Infrastructure Engineer at Sodalis - Hybrid Palo Alto — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
This role is explicitly hybrid in Palo Alto, CA — required in-office on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday each week. That means three fixed days per week at the Palo Alto office, leaving only Tuesday and Friday as remote days. This is not a location-independent or digital-nomad-compatible role.
For travelers or nomads, the constraints are significant:
- Three in-office days per week make extended travel virtually impossible during employment.
- The role also involves on-site visits to pharmacy customer environments, adding additional travel commitments that are work-directed, not lifestyle-driven.
- No async-friendly signals are present — early-stage startup culture typically implies real-time collaboration.
If you're based in or willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area, the $185K–$215K base salary is competitive for the region, though Bay Area cost of living is among the highest in the world. By comparison, that salary would afford an extremely comfortable lifestyle in Lisbon (~€2,500/mo average expenses) or Bangkok (~$1,800/mo), but those cities are not viable bases for this role.
What to look for instead: If you need location flexibility, seek fully remote infrastructure or platform engineering roles at Series B+ companies with explicit async-first policies and no required office days.
Hybrid in Palo Alto (Mon / Wed / Thurs) · $185K–$215K base + meaningful early-stage equity + full benefits
About Sodalis
Specialty pharmacy is where the most complex and expensive drugs reach the most in-need patients, and it still runs on faxes, phone tag, and manual data entry. Patients wait weeks for therapies that can't wait.
Sodalis is building AI agents that run those operations end to end: reading and validating prescriptions, handling phone calls, and moving prescriptions through eligibility and fulfillment. The ambition goes beyond that. We want to be the rails every specialty prescription runs on, and the first system to perform clinical review at the standard of a pharmacist.
We're already in production, processing tens of thousands of prescriptions a week. Backed by Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund), and founded by veterans of Apple's Applied ML, Included Health, and Avella Specialty Pharmacy (scaled to $1.5B+ before its acquisition by OptumRx).
The Opportunity
Everything we run today is cloud-based, and so are the pharmacy management systems we integrate with. But most of the specialty pharmacy market runs on-prem. To reach it, our system has to run on the pharmacy's systems instead of ours. Whether that's the full stack on-site or a hybrid split with our cloud is one of the first decisions you'd make. That's the problem you'd own.
We've never shipped an on-prem deployment, so there's no pattern to follow. You'll decide how our architecture gets packaged and deployed into environments we don't control, what has to change in our current infrastructure to make that possible, and how we maintain and see into those deployments once they're live.
We don't yet know what these environments look like in detail. Some pharmacies may have restricted outbound access, legacy hardware, or IT teams that can't give us a login; others may be more open. Part of the job is going in with our customer, finding out what's actually there, and designing something that works across the range.
You'll start with our AI pharmacy tech product, rolling out with a committed customer, so you build against a real deployment instead of a hypothetical one. You'd work directly with the founders and the early engineering team on the architecture.
What You'll Do
Decide how our architecture runs in a pharmacy's environment, starting with the AI pharmacy tech product: full stack on-site, a hybrid split with our cloud, or something in between.
Adapt our current infrastructure and build the packaging and deployment path that installs and updates Sodalis at each pharmacy.
Own those deployments over time: upgrades, rollbacks, and observability into health and failures without being on site.
Go in with our customer and pharmacy IT teams to learn what their environments actually allow, and design for the range.
Partner with the founders and early engineering team on architecture.
What We're Looking For
5+ years in infrastructure or platform engineering.
You've taken an AWS-native stack and made it run on Kubernetes or similar in environments you don't operate, including stateful services.
You've shipped and maintained software running in environments you don't control: on-prem, customer-hosted, edge, or embedded.
You've kept a fleet of remote installs updated, observable, and recoverable without being able to log into them.
You've set the first pattern for something in a startup and are comfortable with ambiguity.
You'll spend time with pharmacy IT teams and need to understand their constraints firsthand. No healthcare background required.
How We Work
We're a handful of people going all in on a problem we think is worth it, holding a high bar and shipping work that reaches real patients. It's intense, and it isn't for everyone. We want people who want to build something that matters, alongside others who care as much as they do. If that's you, we should talk.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is this role fully remote or does it require time in the office?
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