About Frontal

Frontal is building the infrastructure for enterprise intelligence.

We’re creating an AI-native platform that enables enterprises to turn their data, systems, and operations into intelligent software that can understand, reason, decide, and act. Our stack spans AI infrastructure, models, agents, data, evaluation, observability, and the runtime required to operate intelligent systems reliably in production.

We’re a small, engineering-driven team based in Lisbon, working on problems at the intersection of AI, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise software.

About the role

As an Infrastructure Engineer, you’ll build and operate the systems that power Frontal.

You’ll work across compute, networking, containers, storage, orchestration, deployment, observability, and reliability. Your work will form the foundation on which our AI systems, applications, and enterprise workloads run.

This is not a traditional DevOps role. You’ll be involved in designing the underlying platform itself, including low-level infrastructure, runtime systems, developer tooling, and production operations.

You’ll work closely with AI/ML, platform, and product engineers to make Frontal fast, reliable, secure, and easy to operate at scale.

What you will do

Design, build, and operate Frontal’s production infrastructure.
Build and maintain cloud infrastructure across compute, networking, storage, and security.
Develop infrastructure for containers, clusters, workloads, and distributed services.
Build reliable deployment and release systems for production software.
Improve infrastructure automation through Infrastructure as Code and internal tooling.
Design systems for high availability, fault tolerance, scalability, and disaster recovery.
Operate and optimize workloads across AWS and other cloud infrastructure.
Build the infrastructure required to run AI and GPU workloads efficiently.
Work on Frontal’s runtime and execution environment for applications, agents, and services.
Develop internal platform capabilities that make infrastructure easier for engineers to use.
Build observability across metrics, logs, traces, and system health.
Investigate production incidents, identify root causes, and implement long-term fixes.
Improve system performance, resource utilization, reliability, and operational efficiency.
Establish infrastructure standards around security, networking, deployment, and reliability.
Automate repetitive operational work wherever possible.
Collaborate with AI/ML and software engineers on architecture and productionization.
Contribute to technical architecture decisions across the Frontal platform.
Help establish the engineering practices required to operate Frontal as the company scales.

About you

You have strong fundamentals in distributed systems, operating systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure.
You are comfortable working in Linux environments and debugging systems from the command line.
You have hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or comparable cloud platforms.
You understand containers, orchestration, networking, storage, and service discovery.
You have experience with Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems.
You are comfortable with Infrastructure as Code and automation.
You understand CI/CD and modern software delivery practices.
You have experience operating production systems and responding to incidents.
You understand observability and know how to use logs, metrics, and traces to diagnose problems.
You can write production-quality code in at least one systems or general-purpose programming language.
You understand how distributed services fail and how to design systems that recover gracefully.
You care about reliability, performance, security, and operational simplicity.
You are comfortable working independently and making infrastructure decisions in an early-stage environment.
You enjoy solving difficult problems where the correct solution is not immediately obvious.
You take ownership of systems after they ship, not just during development.

Bonus if you

Have experience with Kubernetes internals or building Kubernetes operators/controllers.
Have worked with AWS services such as EC2, EKS, ECS, Lambda, S3, VPC, or CloudFront.
Have experience with Terraform, Pulumi, or similar Infrastructure as Code tooling.
Have worked with GPU infrastructure or large-scale compute workloads.
Have experience with distributed systems, schedulers, runtimes, or cluster management.
Have experience with Rust, Go, C++, or other systems programming languages.
Have worked with Linux kernel, networking, storage, or performance optimization.
Have experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Loki, or similar observability systems.
Have built internal developer platforms or platform engineering systems.
Have experience designing multi-tenant infrastructure.
Have worked on security, identity, networking, or access-control infrastructure.
Have operated infrastructure at significant scale.
Have contributed to open-source infrastructure or systems projects.

Benefits

Build the infrastructure behind an AI-native enterprise platform from the ground up.
High ownership over foundational systems and technical architecture.
Work directly with the founding team and a small, highly technical engineering team in Lisbon.
Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
Access to modern cloud, compute, and GPU infrastructure.
Work on real distributed systems and enterprise workloads rather than isolated infrastructure projects.
Rapid exposure to AI infrastructure, distributed systems, runtimes, and platform engineering.
A small, high-context team that values direct communication, fast feedback, and shipping.
Company support for conferences, technical events, and open-source contributions.
The opportunity to shape Frontal’s infrastructure, engineering standards, and platform architecture from the ground up.

How we hire

We hire slowly and keep the bar high. An open seat is better than a compromise, and every person who joins should make Frontal better. We look for people who learn unfamiliar territory quickly, take ownership of outcomes, and can move from an idea to a shipped result.

We value builders over narrow executors: people who understand why the work matters, exercise product judgment, and make the whole company stronger.

Our process is practical and work-based. We will ask you to reason through an unfamiliar systems problem, make tradeoffs, and build or critique something. Curiosity and evidence of craft matter more than university names, titles, or a polished résumé. A résumé is optional, never required; send a short note about the work you are proudest of and links that help us understand how you think.

We expect high standards from one another without creating a culture of bureaucracy. Strong people should be able to operate with autonomy, say “I don’t know,” challenge assumptions, change their minds, and remain honest about what is true. Integrity and clear communication matter as much as technical ability.

Frontal should be a place where exceptional people become substantially better. We want to build the company that ambitious builders in Portugal most want to spend the important years of their careers contributing to. That starts with the quality of the work, people, and products.