Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure & Release

About the role

Feanix is rebuilding animal breeding from the genome up using whole‑genome sequencing and custom ML models to help dairy farmers make better breeding and herd‑management decisions. The company’s product Autopilot ingests farm data, configures models around each operation's economics and goals, and generates farm‑specific decisions for every animal in the herd — which to breed, which to cull, which to sell. Autopilot runs overnight and delivers decisions into the herd‑management software the farm already uses. Feanix currently works with ~30 of the largest dairies (~250,000+ cows) and plans to grow to 50 farms in the next 5 months and to half of that market within 12 months while launching new offerings.

This role exists to increase the stability, efficiency, and speed of the engineering team and system. You will own the foundation that other engineers build on, measured by how fast they learn whether a change is safe and how fast they discover failures. You will own the entire delivery ecosystem — from an engineer’s commit to decisions landing on a farm — including environments, gates, rollout mechanisms, and verification that a run started, finished on time, and reached the farm.

Responsibilities

• CI, test and release engineering (~50% of the role)
• Observability (~25%)
• Access control, cost management, and consolidating infrastructure as code (~25%)
• Work on a Windows fleet (small slice)
• Define alerting and service‑level objectives for the farm pipeline
• Instrument “decisions on the farm by time T” per herd so that a run that never started, never finished, or finished late is escalated before anyone on the farm notices
• Build a release path where staging runs on every commit, giving engineers rapid feedback on correctness
• Own infrastructure as code end to end
• Turn the current cost baseline into a real cost curve per herd, eliminate obvious waste, and help engineers estimate costs before shipping
• Provide test infrastructure that other engineers depend on (including for third‑party herd software and file‑transfer machines) and make that boundary testable

How we work

Python end‑to‑end on AWS: FastAPI service and Celery workers on ECS Fargate, PostgreSQL and S3 behind them, OpenTofu and GitHub Actions for provisioning and shipping. Bursty GPU workloads run on managed compute rather than a self‑operated cluster, split per workload deliberately. Engineers direct coding agents against real work and build harnesses to verify agent output; roughly half of recent commits are co‑authored with agents. Infrastructure as code remains the rule: changes are reviewed, versioned, and applied through CI, not typed into a console.

Requirements

• Strong OpenTofu or Terraform and deep AWS expertise (ECS/Fargate, IAM, S3, networking)
• Test and release engineering: CI design, test environments with real databases, staged rollouts, regression testing of pipeline outputs (not just unit tests)
• Operational judgment — alerting that pages on the right thing, service objectives that reflect actual customer experience
• Comfort with heterogeneous compute environments without needing to unify them
• Strong Python; proficiency with GitHub Actions and OIDC
• Security fundamentals and the judgment to apply them proportionately at this stage
• Daily, load‑bearing use of coding agents and a clear view of where they break down
• Authorized to work in the United States; Feanix cannot offer visa sponsorship or transfers

Preferred qualifications (not required):

• Background as an infrastructure engineer, release engineer, SRE, or ops
• Creative thinking about how agents are changing this role
• Motivation to support other engineers through your technical work
• Experience supporting a small team through rapid growth
• Fleet management for software running on machines you don’t control
• Compliance readiness (SOC 2 or similar) – useful but not expected