Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Title: Principal Infrastructure Engineer


San Francisco, CA - Hybrid

The role


As a Principal Infrastructure Engineer, you will lead the design and automation of how Nextdata OS is provisioned and operated across environments-primarily managed Kubernetes, often in customer-owned cloud accounts.


You will work on systems that directly shape how data mesh is adopted in practice.


You will bring experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, including data and ML infrastructure, to help deliver a secure, self-service platform for data product teams.

You will:

• Design and implement deployment models for PaaS, SaaS, and customer-managed environments
• Build scalable, modular infrastructure-as-code and maintain high code quality through reviews
• Work closely with customers to understand real-world constraints and requirements
• Collaborate with product and engineering to evolve the platform
• Take ownership of what you ship, including production reliability

You are the right fit if you have

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 8+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering
• Experience and willingness to work directly with customers
• Experience working in early-stage or growing startups, shaping infrastructure from the ground up
• Strong experience with Kubernetes-based systems and multi-cloud environments
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD systems for cloud-native applications
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating PaaS and SaaS platforms at scale
• Experience with data and ML ecosystems across platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Azure, or GCP
• A track record of managing infrastructure cost and performance trade-offs
• Experience contributing to or leading security reviews and audits
• Strong troubleshooting skills and a focus on reliability

Technical depth in:

• Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS) and containerization (Docker)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Cloud networking (AWS VPC, Azure VNet, GCP VPC)
• Observability tools (Prometheus, ELK or similar)
• Service meshes (Istio, Linkerd)
• Cloud security practices