Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)

About The Role

Join an early-stage, venture-backed AI infrastructure startup building a next-generation, GitOps-native distributed operating system on top of Kubernetes. As a Platform Engineer, you'll work directly alongside the founding team to design and build the core platform that abstracts Kubernetes complexity while preserving its power — enabling teams to go from bare metal to production AI clusters in days, not months. This is a high-impact, hands-on role at a small (2–10 person) company with meaningful open-source components. You'll shape architecture decisions, establish engineering patterns, and contribute to a product used by GPU-intensive AI inference and training workloads at scale.

What You'll Do

• Build and extend core platform features in Go, including custom Kubernetes operators and controllers
• Design and implement GitOps workflows with ArgoCD to make continuous deployment seamless and automatic
• Develop infrastructure-as-code patterns using Terraform and Helm to provision and manage clusters
• Work on distributed storage solutions using Ceph and WEKA for high-performance, scalable cluster storage
• Create observability and monitoring systems with Prometheus and Grafana to surface cluster health and performance
• Build and optimize container networking with Cilium for network security and observability
• Design and implement federated Kubernetes architectures for multi-cluster management
• Build automation tooling that reduces operational overhead for developers running production workloads
• Contribute to open-source components and establish platform architecture patterns as an early team member

What We're Looking For

Required:

• Strong foundational engineering talent — we prioritize aptitude and hunger to learn over years of specific experience
• Proficiency in Go and hands-on Kubernetes experience (operators, CRDs, controllers)
• Experience with distributed storage solutions such as Ceph and/or WEKA
• Experience with ArgoCD and CI/CD pipeline automation
• Comfort with Terraform, Helm, and related infrastructure provisioning tools
• Self-directed, strong communicator, and able to prioritize independently in a fast-moving environment
• Ability to work on-site in San Francisco, CA

Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with Ansible or Kubespray
• Background with service mesh technologies (Istio or Linkerd) or CNI plugins
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their managed Kubernetes offerings
• Contributions to Kubernetes ecosystem tools or other open-source infrastructure projects
• 2+ years of software development experience in a platform, SRE, or infrastructure role

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 USD annually
• Early-stage equity
• Visa sponsorship available

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be willing and able to work in-person. Visa sponsorship is available for qualified candidates.