Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)

About the Role We're a small, fast-moving AI infrastructure company building an open-source, GitOps-native distributed operating system on top of Kubernetes — purpose-built to handle demanding AI workloads including inference pipelines, distributed training, storage orchestration, and GPU scheduling. Our platform enables companies to go from bare metal to a fully operational, production-grade AI cluster in days. As a Platform Engineer, you'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the founding team to design and evolve the core platform: abstracting away Kubernetes complexity without sacrificing its power. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role at a company where your architectural decisions will directly shape the product and the engineering culture. Visa sponsorship is available. 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 at scale.
• Work on distributed storage solutions using Ceph and WEKA for high-performance, scalable cluster storage.
• Build observability and monitoring systems with Prometheus and Grafana to surface cluster health and performance.
• Optimize container networking with Cilium for network security and deep 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 help establish platform architecture patterns as an early team member.

What We're Looking For Required:

• 2+ years of software development experience (strong foundational talent is prioritized over years of specific experience).
• Proficiency in Go with hands-on experience building developer tools or infrastructure products.
• Solid Kubernetes experience — operators, CRDs, controllers, and/or etcd.
• Experience with distributed storage solutions such as Ceph and/or WEKA.
• Genuine hunger and self-direction; you thrive with autonomy and take ownership of your work.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with ArgoCD and CI/CD pipeline automation workflows.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform, Helm, and related IaC tooling; familiarity with Ansible or Kubespray is a plus.
• Background with service mesh technologies (Istio, 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.
• Experience with containerization, networking, and cloud-native architectures.

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location This is a full-time, on-site role based in San Francisco, CA. We work in person and believe in the energy and speed that comes from being in the same room as your teammates.