Cloud / DevOps Engineer (Infra & IaC)

What you'll do

A leading AI lab wants its models to reason about infrastructure the way an on-call SRE does. You supply the material: realistic problems in cluster diagnosis, AWS integration and infrastructure automation, correct solutions to them, and the rubrics that separate a good answer from a plausible one.

Responsibilities in the ad:

• Designing hard, domain-relevant tasks and writing accurate solutions for Kubernetes failures, AWS service integration and IaC problems
• Evaluating other infrastructure tasks and solutions, with written technical feedback
• Building rubrics and evaluation frameworks for cluster failure diagnosis, IaC design quality and CI/CD reasoning
• Advising research and engineering teams on where the model's knowledge falls short
• Working with other subject experts to keep the data consistent

Who qualifies

• 4+ years in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, SRE or platform engineering at a recognised, top-tier organisation
• Hands-on production Kubernetes, including diagnosing and repairing broken clusters. The ad specifically excludes people whose experience is only writing manifests or using a managed control plane
• Production Terraform and/or AWS CDK
• Production AWS integration including Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB
• Building and owning CI/CD pipelines
• Demonstrable career progression
• 40 hours a week on weekdays
• Must be located in the United States

That Kubernetes line is the main filter. If your cluster experience is EKS or GKE with the control plane managed for you and you have never had to fix etcd or a broken CNI yourself, the ad is telling you it wants someone else.

What it pays

$75–110 per hour as W-2 employment through Cincinnatus LLC, the employer of record, which provides payroll, benefits and compliance. The ad does not publish a payment schedule.

Worth knowing

Good:

• W-2 employment with benefits
• A strong rate for infrastructure work
• The work uses real incident experience

Less good:

• Full-time, 40 hours a week, US-only
• No duration published
• "Top-tier organisation" is not defined
• The lab is not named

About this listing

Posted on Mercor's platform, read on 24 September 2026. Employment is through Cincinnatus LLC, placed at a leading AI lab as extended workforce. Pay, location and qualifications are from the ad. See Mercor.