Principal Member of Technical Staff

Responsibilities

• Architect, implement, and operate highly available Kubernetes clusters supporting thousands of concurrent persistent resources.
• Design and develop custom resource definitions and Kubernetes operators for AI agent lifecycles, research pipelines, and long-running compute tasks.
• Define cluster scaling, node pool management, autoscaling, resource quota, scheduling, placement, and affinity strategies.
• Build and maintain reproducible infrastructure-as-code environments using Terraform, Pulumi, or similar tools.
• Establish observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices for infrastructure systems.
• Own Kubernetes storage and networking strategy, including persistent volumes, CSI drivers, service mesh, network policies, and ingress.
• Troubleshoot complex distributed infrastructure issues and guide others through debugging and remediation.
• Collaborate with backend, ML, and research teams to translate workload requirements into reliable infrastructure patterns.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional infrastructure or platform engineering experience with deep hands-on Kubernetes expertise in production.
• Experience designing and implementing CRDs and Kubernetes operators using tools such as Kubebuilder, Operator SDK, or controller-runtime.
• Experience operating and scaling Kubernetes clusters with thousands of persistent or long-lived resources.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes internals, including the API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager, and kubelet.
• Expertise with AWS EKS, GCP GKE, or Azure AKS and related networking, storage, and IAM primitives.
• Proficiency in at least one systems or backend programming language for operator development and infrastructure tooling.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform, Pulumi, or Crossplane and GitOps workflows.
• Strong knowledge of container networking, CNI plugins, service mesh, network policies, CSI, persistent volumes, StatefulSets, RBAC, Pod Security Standards, and secrets management.
• Ability to work autonomously, make sound technical judgments, and drive projects from concept through production.
• Preferred experience with data-intensive platforms, scientific computing, ML/AI infrastructure, startups, significant architectural ownership, or scaling systems, teams, or platforms through rapid growth.

Benefits

• Full healthcare coverage with 100% of premiums paid for employees and dependents.
• Yearly new parent stipend and fertility coverage through Carrot.
• Mental health support through Rula.
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave for maternity, paternity, and adoption.
• Yearly employer-funded pet care stipend.
• Pre-tax commuter benefits for transit and parking.
• 401(k) company matching.
• $300 quarterly health and wellness benefit.
• Free lunch during office days and dinner when working late.
• Regular team off-sites and company events.
• Full-time, on-site work at the San Francisco Dogpatch office.