Work at a Startup

About Consensus:

Consensus is building the OS for research. Today, our academic search engine helps 8 million students, researchers, and doctors analyze scientific papers and complete literature reviews 10x faster.

Our Series A was led by USV, with major participation from top AI investors, including Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Consensus has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Nature, and a16z as one of today’s most exciting and important AI startups.

Our mission is to empower the world to understand, create, and apply good science. Help us build the future of research.

Role: Platform Engineer to own, improve, and scale the cloud infrastructure that powers our AI research platform.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve our cloud platform (Kubernetes, Terraform, GCP) to keep it secure, performant, and highly available.
• Build and maintain observability, deployment, and incident response systems (Datadog, CI/CD, runbooks) so engineers can ship quickly and safely.
• Debug and optimize backend and infrastructure performance alongside product, data, and ML engineers to keep our AI search and inference pipelines fast and reliable.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years building and operating high-throughput cloud infrastructure in production
• Deep experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, and modern CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar) on a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
• Strong background in monitoring, alerting, load testing, and cloud security best practices.
• Comfort debugging backend systems (Python, FastAPI, Postgres, Redis) and supporting ML/search infrastructure.
• Track record of high ownership, high-velocity delivery, sharp prioritization, and interest in science, research, and LLM-powered products.

Compensation:

• $160-$230k cash
• Competitive Series A equity

Final offers are determined by multiple factors and may vary from the amounts listed above.