---
title: 'DevOps Engineer at Smallest'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/devops-engineer-smallest-bengaluru-bygxrbbjemtm'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-16'
---

# DevOps Engineer at Smallest 

- **Company:** Smallest 
- **Location:** Bengaluru, India
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/smallest/1486f970-0cd9-4470-8781-4118f5b81e1e

## Job description

DevOps Engineer

## About the Role

We’re looking for a hands-on DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer who enjoys building systems that run reliably in production. You’ve seen early-stage chaos, fast scale-ups, or have built serious infrastructure on your own. You understand that reliability is earned through ownership, automation, and clean engineering — not titles or years of experience. You will take approved system architecture and turn it into real, working infrastructure, translating High-Level Designs (HLD) into practical, battle-tested Low-Level Designs (LLD). This is a deeply execution-focused role. You will work on production systems every day — deploying, scaling, observing, fixing, and improving them continuously. At Smallest, infrastructure is not a support function — it is the product.

## What We Care About (More Than Experience)

We do not care about years of experience. We care about:

- Your understanding of our platform. This is important.
- Your approach towards client satisfaction
- Your ability to design and operate systems that don’t fall over
- Your instinct to determine what to automate and when to automate
- Your understanding of how systems behave under real traffic
- Your willingness to take ownership when production breaks
- Your ability to debug calmly, fix permanently, and document clearly
- You are flexible and agile

If you’ve learned these skills through startups, side projects, homelabs, open source, or real production failures — you’re qualified.

## Key Responsibilities

- Implement and manage AWS-centric cloud infrastructure using Terraform
- Operate Kubernetes (EKS) clusters across multiple environments
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions
- Deploy services using Helm and Argo CD (GitOps)
- Implement canary, blue/green, and rolling deployments
- Build and manage Docker images and registries
- Configure monitoring, alerting, and logging using New Relic and CloudWatch
- Manage AWS networking: VPCs, subnets, routing, ALB/NLB, security groups
- Support RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, Redis, and MongoDB infrastructure
- Support frontend delivery using CloudFront and AWS Amplify
- Write automation scripts in Bash, Python, or Go
- Troubleshoot incidents and participate in postmortems

Required Skill Set

- Strong hands-on experience with AWS and Kubernetes
- Solid Linux and networking fundamentals
- CI/CD pipeline design and ownership mindset
- Production debugging and incident handling experience
- Knowledge of SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets

Strong Plus

- Startup or scale-up production exposure
- DevOps/SRE side projects or homelabs
- Open-source contributions in cloud-native ecosystem
- Experience with cost optimization and capacity planning
- Terraform-based infrastructure automation
- Helm and GitOps-based deployment workflows

Mindset We Value

- High ownership and accountability
- Comfort working in ambiguity
- Automation-first thinking
- Reliability over velocity without safety
- Strong bias toward learning from failures

If you have the need for speed, action bias, enjoy building infrastructure that scales, fixing real production problems, and making systems boringly reliable — this role is for you.

## About Smallest 

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Smallest.ai builds compact, high-performance voice and multi-modal AI models for real-time voice agent orchestration.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Akshat Mandloi (Co-Founder); other founders not publicly disclosed.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Voice AI, Artificial Intelligence, Multi-modal AI, Enterprise AI Infrastructure.
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises, developers, and platform teams building voice agents for healthcare, debt collection, real estate, e-commerce, and small businesses.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Driving the future of small, efficient multi-modal models.” The company believes AI will evolve like human intelligence – many small specialized models rather than one massive model.

## Products & Services
- **Text-to-Speech (TTS) – Lightning**: Blazing-fast TTS for real-time voice agents with 100ms latency, supporting 15+ languages.
- **Speech-to-Text (STT) – Pulse**: High-accuracy transcription in 38 languages with emotion and speaker detection.
- **Speech-to-Speech (S2S)**: One of the first native speech-to-speech models built for production.
- **Small Language Model (SLM)**: A sub-3B parameter language model that outperforms GPT-4.1 on key benchmarks.
- **Voice Cloning**: Real-time voice cloning capability integrated into the platform.
- **Agent Platform – Hydra**: A unified interface to configure voice agents, select voices, set languages, and go live. Supports on‑prem and private cloud deployments.
- **Enterprise Compliance**: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI compliant.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company).
- **Key Metric – Total Funding**: $9 million (Seed round $8M led by Sierra Ventures in Sept 2025; Pre-Seed and Non-Equity Assistance from AWS).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Sierra Ventures (lead), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ashish Kakran (Seed investor and board member).
- **Growth Signals**:
  - 64 employees (as of mid‑2026); 3.1% monthly headcount growth.
  - 32,960 LinkedIn followers; active hiring with 4 open positions.
  - Presence in the US, India, and Canada; 46% of workforce in India, 27% in the US.
  - SOC 2/GDPR/HIPAA/PCI compliance enables adoption in regulated industries.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Efficiency vs. Size**: Sub-3B SLM outperforms GPT-4.1, enabling lower cost and faster inference without sacrificing quality.
- **Ultra‑Low Latency**: Real-time voice with 100ms end‑to‑end latency for TTS.
- **Multi‑Modal Native**: First‑to‑market native speech‑to‑speech model alongside SLM, STT, and TTS.
- **Enterprise‑Grade Security**: On‑premise and private cloud deployment with full compliance certifications (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI).
- **Single‑Platform Orchestration**: Hydra agent platform unifies model selection, voice config, language, and deployment.

## Strategic Focus
- Scale adoption of voice AI across regulated verticals (healthcare, financial services, debt collection).
- Continue R&D on smaller, more efficient models that can run on‑premise.
- Grow enterprise sales and expand partnerships (e.g., AWS).
- Build out the agent orchestration layer to reduce integration friction for developers.

## Why Work Here
- **Engineering Culture**: Small research lab with a focus on bleeding‑edge model efficiency; strong emphasis on shipping production‑grade systems.
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Not explicitly stated; offices in San Francisco, India, and Canada, suggesting a hybrid or flexible approach.
- **Notable Perks**: Opportunity to work on frontier AI models from scratch, influence product direction, and deploy at scale. Access to enterprise‑grade infrastructure and compliance frameworks.
- **Team Composition**: 20% technical, 9% research, with founders deeply involved; talent sourced from top tech firms (Qualcomm, Meesho, Observe.AI).

## Sources
1. [smallest.ai](https://smallest.ai/)
2. [LinkedIn – smallest.ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/smallest)
3. [Jobs.ashbyhq.com – Smallest](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/smallest)
4. [PitchBook – smallest.ai profile](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/596572-75)
5. [Tracxn – smallest.ai profile](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/smallestai/__M_bkNG86V8a7CnAiGLw2oCkEQHuMuRhd0YAMsTbEeGU)

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