What Success Looks Like in the First 90 Days
Days 1-30: Map the entire infrastructure and find what’s fragile.
Get access to every deployment - AWS, Azure, customer-hosted environments. Understand the full topology: how Kubernetes clusters are configured, how GPU nodes serve models, how document pipelines move data from EHR ingestion to extraction to structured output. Your first job is to understand what is already built, where the sharp edges are, and what breaks when load spikes or a deployment goes sideways. By end of month one, you should have a written map of every production environment, know which deployments are most fragile, and have identified the top 3 infrastructure risks.
Days 30-60: Own production stability and start shipping backend services.
Take ownership of at least one customer deployment end-to-end - monitoring, alerting, incident response. Set up observability that catches pipeline failures and data quality regressions before customers report them (today, customers often find issues first). Simultaneously, pick up a backend product feature - patient data processing, document pipeline improvement, or a platform feature the product team needs. Ship it. The goal is to make sure you can context-switch between infra firefighting and product engineering.
Days 60-90: Standardize deployments and Monitor Everything.
Document deployment runbooks, automate what’s manual, and build CI/CD improvements that make releases safer and faster. You should have a clear plan for what the infrastructure needs to look like to support 2-3x the current customer count without adding headcount proportionally.