Head of Infrastructure & Security

Albert helps chemists change the world by building technology that understands how they work. As chemists ourselves, we know what it’s like when software doesn’t work the way you do — stuck with systems built by people who never spent a day at the bench. That’s why we created Albert OS, the first AI-native operating system for materials science, designed to remove every obstacle between curiosity and discovery.

We're looking for a Head of Infrastructure & Security to build and own the global infrastructure, reliability, and security function at Albert. This is a program-building role, not a program-inheriting one. You'll sit at the intersection of cloud architecture, site reliability engineering, and enterprise security, reporting directly to the VP of Engineering.

If you believe infrastructure done right is a competitive advantage, we want to hear from you.

What you'll do

• Cloud architecture across all engineering teams: common IaC tooling, unified monitoring, CI/CD standardization, and the internal developer platform.
• Albert's security posture end-to-end: patching, SAST/DAST, WAF, SIEM, EDR, IDS/IPS, data loss prevention, and Zero Trust across cloud and identity. You'll also own the third-party security partnership, enterprise audit and questionnaire response, and security awareness across the company.
• Cloud cost strategy in partnership with Finance: per-unit metrics, team-level budget visibility, vendor contracts, and leadership-facing dashboards on infrastructure efficiency.
• The global SRE function on a follow-the-sun model: an existing India team, US presence, and a planned Germany-anchored EU team.
• The ML/AI infrastructure platform that the data science team builds on.
• Interoperability with partner Azure environments: identity federation, private connectivity, and bring-your-own-key.

What you'll deliver in the first year

• An SLO framework, error budget model, and service tiering classification that give engineering and leadership a shared language for reliability trade-offs.
• A functioning incident program: escalation paths defined, on-call rotations in place, DR and business continuity strategy documented, and the first post-mortem run end-to-end.
• An SRE organization with clear regional ownership and a roadmap for the EU buildout.
• MLOps infrastructure ownership off the AI/ML team, so the data science team ships models without managing backend infrastructure.
• Our first enterprise security audit passed with an owned, defensible posture rather than a manually assembled response.
• A unified cloud architecture with measurable cost reduction against a defined per-unit baseline.

You will have

• 8+ years in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering, with at least 3 years in a senior leadership role owning a team or function.
• Deep, current AWS expertise: ECS, multi-account organization design, IAM and KMS, CloudTrail-based audit evidence.
• Container orchestration at architectural depth, decision-making rather than operations. ECS and EKS are both in production here, and the consolidation question between them is live.
• Experience building SLO frameworks, error budgets, incident response, and DR programs from scratch, not inheriting them.
• Experience building or managing global, distributed engineering teams across time zones.
• Strong security fundamentals: cloud security architecture, IAM, Zero Trust, network segmentation, SAST/DAST, SIEM/EDR, and working knowledge of SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, or equivalent.
• A track record of cloud cost reduction through FinOps: unit economics, per-team budget accountability, and leadership-facing visibility.
• Startup or high-growth experience, and the ability to distinguish tech debt that matters from tech debt that can wait.
• Preferred: MLOps infrastructure (Kubeflow, Airflow, or equivalent), defense or government-adjacent compliance experience (NIST 800-171, CMMC, ITAR, FedRAMP), and relevant certifications (CISSP, CISM, CCSP).

Key competencies

Systems Thinking: Ability to visualize and design how AI agent systems connect, share data, and enable valuable customer outcomes at scale.

Grit: Self-starter, persistent problem solver, relentless in the pursuit of progress in ambiguous 0-to-1 product environments.

Customer Empathy: Deep understanding of how enterprise customers operate; asks the right questions and designs solutions that stick.

Innovator: Passionate about applying emerging AI capabilities to practical, measurable business problems before the patterns are written.

Adaptability: Comfortable operating in dynamic, fast-moving customer and company environments where the approach evolves with new information.

Leadership: Ability to drive agent skill initiatives end-to-end with minimal oversight, aligning cross-functional teams to shared outcomes.

Why Albert?

We have a huge impact. Albert is a growing team with a global reach. We’re building toward a future where discovery feels like exploration, not administration. Where chemists can pursue their most ambitious ideas without friction.

We love our global team. Albert’s home-base is in the California Bay Area, but we have multiple offices and employees sprinkled around the globe: India, Germany and Japan. In fact, over 50% of our employees work outside of California. An international remote culture is in our DNA.

We care about you. Albert works hard to create a positive environment for our employees, and we think your life outside of work is important too. We work hard and we play hard.

We value diversity. Growing and maintaining our inclusive and diverse team matters to us. We are committed to being a company where our employees feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work and have the ability to be successful every day.

We’re always looking for humble, sharp, and creative folks to join the Albert team. If you think you might be a fit, please apply.