Software Engineer - Member of Technical Staff (Platform)

About Mithril

Mithril is an AI infrastructure platform built to make GPU compute more accessible and affordable for the world’s leading enterprises, AI startups, and the AI research community, including LG AI Research, Saronic, and the Broad Institute (among many others). Founded by a former Google DeepMind research scientist and Stanford CS PhD, Mithril has raised $80M across seed and Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital & Lightspeed Venture Partners. Platform revenue has grown >6x over the past year, and we were recently recognized by Fast Company as the 8th Most Innovative Company in Artificial Intelligence for 2026.

We are at an inflection point: transitioning from bare-metal operations to a cloud-native, multi-provider platform with a differentiated auction and flexibility model. You would be joining at the moment the platform is being built, not inherited.

About the Opportunity

You will work across Mithril's three core engineering areas — Consumption (the developer-facing product, billing, and API surface), Platform (the orchestration and marketplace engine), and Supply (integrations with cloud providers and capacity management). You will own meaningful slices of each, shipping features end-to-end against a product that handles real revenue and business-critical customer workloads.

This is not a single-domain role. You'll move between backend systems, marketplace logic, and customer-facing surfaces — with direct exposure to the architectural decisions shaping how Mithril scales.

What Makes This Role Different

Most early-stage engineering roles at infrastructure companies are either deep in systems (little product surface) or deep in product (little systems exposure). At Mithril, you'll work across both: the orchestration engine that manages GPU capacity across providers, and the developer-facing surfaces that customers use to reserve, bid, and consume that capacity.

The systems you build will handle real money, real workloads, and real market dynamics — spot auctions, reservation pricing, and capacity allocation across a heterogeneous supply base. If you want to understand how GPU infrastructure markets actually work and build the systems that run them, this is that role.

Core Responsibilities

Backend & API

• Build and maintain backend Python APIs powering Mithril's reservation, bidding, billing, and usage surfaces — including usage visualization and the billing platform.
• Write and maintain database migrations, design relational schemas for complex multi-entity models (orders, allocations, grants, quotas), and optimize queries for performance.
• Own features end-to-end: from design doc through backend API, database migration, feature flag rollout, and monitoring.

Platform & Marketplace

• Design and implement orchestration primitives for flexible reservations: pause/return credits, reservation extensions, capacity algorithm updates, and the auction model connecting spot and reserved capacity.
• Contribute to operational maturity — quota systems, financial controls, fraud prevention, and inventory management automation — so Mithril can scale supply sources without scaling headcount linearly.

Supply Integrations

• Contribute to supply-side integrations, bringing GCP, Nebius, and OCI resources under Mithril management through the Mithril API.
• Build tooling to give operators visibility into managed capacity and surface supply constraints early.

Consumption & Developer Tooling

• Build consumption tooling to help developers make better decisions: reservation calculators, bid modeling, cost dashboards, and CLI extensions.
• Work across the client frontend to ship customer-facing features including usage graphs, billing views, and reservation management UIs.

Operations

• Participate in on-call rotations, triage production incidents, and contribute to operational runbooks and automation that reduce toil over time.

Requirements

The profile we're hiring for is a generalist with strong backend instincts — someone who has shipped and maintained production systems at real scale, and is comfortable owning features across the full stack when needed.

• Strong Python backend skills — you've built and maintained production APIs at real scale, not just prototypes.
• Proven experience with distributed systems; comfortable with messaging systems (RabbitMQ, Kafka) and RPC methods (gRPC, protobuf, tRPC).
• Fluency with relational databases: schema design, query optimization, and migrations in production environments.
• Ability to own a feature end-to-end — from design doc through backend API, database migration, feature flag rollout, and monitoring.
• Strong debugging instincts: calm and systematic when triaging production incidents, with a bias toward durable fixes.
• Comfortable in small teams where ownership is high and process is lightweight.

Nice to Have

• Experience with marketplace and billing systems — especially variable-usage, auction-based, or complex reservation models.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, AWS infrastructure, or cloud provider APIs (GCP, OCI, Nebius).
• Familiarity with Linux containers and container orchestration (Docker Swarm, Nomad).
• Comfort working across the stack — Python backend and TypeScript/React frontend.
• Experience with developer tools or CLIs (bonus: SkyPilot or similar frameworks).
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Kustomize) or observability tooling (Grafana, Prometheus).
• Background in real-time systems: SSE, WebSockets, or event-driven architectures.
• Prior experience at a startup where you wore multiple hats and shipped across domains.

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• 401k Plan with company match
• 14 company holidays; including 2 floating holidays

Salary Range Information  

In consideration of market analysis and various pertinent factors, the remuneration bracket for this role is set between $170,000 and $230,000. Nevertheless, adjustments beyond this range could be warranted for candidates whose qualifications substantially deviate from those delineated in the job description.

In-Office Requirement

At Mithril, we take our work extremely seriously, though not always ourselves. We recognize that we are striving to achieve something substantial—an all-too-rare and elusive counterfactual contribution. Our work is not easy, so we seek out any lever that can accelerate our progress and increase the likelihood of realizing our full ambitions. Working collaboratively in person is one such lever.

Our headquarters is in Palo Alto (very near the Caltrain station) and we recently opened a second office in the Jackson Square area of San Francisco. We expect team members to primarily work from their local office (Palo Alto or SF), with everyone gathering at HQ a minimum one day a week while our team remains small and cross-collaboration is critical.

This approach is built on trust. We take our mission seriously and are committed to fostering an environment where you can make impactful decisions and drive success. We also understand that life can present challenges, and if extenuating circumstances arise, we’re here to support you.

Ultimately, we believe this guidance helps us be as effective as possible while maintaining the spirit of teamwork and flexibility.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Mithril maintains a strict commitment to Equal Opportunity employment practices. All applicants are evaluated without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.

We emphasize that candidates need not fulfill every expectation listed to be eligible for this position. Our objective is to cultivate a diverse team encompassing a spectrum of backgrounds, experiences, and skill sets.