Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)
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.
- Ability to work on-site in San Francisco, CA.
Platform Engineer at an early-stage AI infrastructure startup in San Francisco. Build Kubernetes platform with Go, ArgoCD, Terraform, and more. On-site, visa sponsorship available, $150k-$200k.
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.