AI Platform Engineer

Company: OpenVPN

About the Company: OpenVPN is the creator of the OpenVPN protocol—the most widely deployed VPN protocol in the world, powering millions of secure connections daily for enterprises, governments, and individuals globally. Products include CloudConnexa and Access Server. Fully remote US-based operations.

Job Category: DevOps / AI Platform / Cloud Infrastructure / MLOps

Contract Type: Full-Time, Permanent

Location: Remote — USA (16 US states listed including CA, NY, TX, FL, CO, VA, WA, and more)

Salary: $140,000–$150,000 base + full benefits

Application Link: https://careers.openvpn.net/o/ai-platform-engineer

Posted: May 1, 2026 (active on HN Who's Hiring May 2026 and live on OpenVPN's career portal)

Job Description: OpenVPN is building out AI tooling across the organization but the infrastructure, governance, and operational patterns don't exist yet. This is a greenfield ownership role — you're writing the playbook from scratch. You'll define architectural standards, establish governance frameworks, and build the platform layer that makes AI trustworthy at OpenVPN: developer tooling, internal AI workflows, and the cloud infrastructure to support it all.

Key Responsibilities, AI Developer Tooling:

• Own the rollout and operational management of AI-assisted development tools (Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code) across engineering
• Define and implement access controls, license management, and usage policies satisfying SOC2/ISO 27001 requirements
• Build cost tracking and reporting so leadership has visibility into AI tool spend and usage patterns
• Reduce friction for engineers adopting AI tools while maintaining security and auditability

Key Responsibilities, Internal AI Workflows:

• Partner with teams to identify, build, and support internal AI applications — RAG pipelines, agents, automation workflows
• Evaluate and recommend tooling and frameworks based on what teams actually need
• Define the boundary between infrastructure responsibility and consuming team responsibility

Key Responsibilities, Governance, Security & Compliance:

• Advise on data governance policies for LLM usage — what data can go into which models, where outputs are stored, how audit trails are maintained
• Ensure AI infrastructure meets SOC2 and ISO 27001 controls for audit evidence
• Provide leadership with clear regular reporting on AI adoption, cost, risk, and usage

Key Responsibilities, AI/ML Cloud Infrastructure:

• Stand up and manage AI/ML infrastructure, primarily on GCP (Vertex AI) within OpenVPN's existing environment
• Design Terraform modules and IaC patterns for AI infrastructure following Atlantis-driven GitOps conventions

Requirements:

• Hands-on experience standing up and managing AI/ML infrastructure such as Vertex AI, SageMaker, or Azure ML
• Has set up AI developer tooling (Cursor, Copilot) at org level including rollout, access, and cost management
• Terraform fluency — write modules others consume through self-service, managed through Atlantis
• Ability to work across teams and define boundaries for a new capability area without established patterns
• Can communicate clearly with leadership about cost, risk, and value of AI investments
• Authorized to work in the US without visa sponsorship (no sponsorship available now or in the future)

Strong Preference: Strong GCP experience; SOC2/ISO 27001 compliance experience; model serving infrastructure (Vertex AI endpoints, Bedrock, Azure OpenAI); RAG infrastructure (vector databases, embedding pipelines); LLM operational patterns including prompt caching, batching, model versioning.

Benefits: Competitive compensation ($140K–$150K base), generous PTO, flexible scheduling, fully remote work environment, global collaboration with Silicon Valley colleagues.