Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Who we are: At Arkana Laboratories, everyone has an important role to fill. Come join us and be a part of a team dedicated to making life better for those who need it most.

This place is packed with super-smart people who do their best work together. We work hard every day to advance our understanding of disease and provide world-class care to our patients in hopes of leaving our corner of the world a little better than we found it. While we are committed to improving the lives of thousands of patients, we never lose sight of the realization that they are the reason we get to create change in our field.

Built on generosity, teamwork, and the freedom to try new things, we take great pride in our work. Great ideas come from everywhere in this company and we celebrate each success and failure for the opportunity it gives us to keep reaching. For more than twenty years after our founder, Dr. Patrick Walker, wrote his goals on the back of a napkin, our people, culture, and values have remained strong.

About the Role

Arkana is the nation's leading renal pathology practice. We hold one of the richest kidney biopsy datasets in the world, and we are building the infrastructure to train clinical AI models on it. That includes an NVIDIA Blackwell class GPU cluster that almost no one in healthcare, and no one else in Central Arkansas, can match. It sits alongside a hybrid cloud platform, a laboratory information system built in house, and clinical AI products used by nephrologists every day. You will design and build the infrastructure behind all of it.

The Principal Infrastructure Engineer is the senior most technical individual contributor in our technology operations organization. This is a pure technical leadership role with no direct reports. You own the architecture, build alongside the team, solve the hardest problems, and raise the bar for the engineers around you. You report to the Director of Technology Operations and work alongside a small team of senior infrastructure engineers.

We created this role because the work demands it. The AI infrastructure buildout, the hybrid cloud migration, and the clinical platform architecture each need someone whose full time job is getting the design right and seeing it through to running systems.

What You'll Do

AI and compute architecture

• Design and stand up our Blackwell class GPU training cluster, including node architecture, power and cooling requirements, high throughput NVMe storage for whole slide imaging workloads, and expansion planning for additional nodes
• Architect inference infrastructure for self hosted open weight models serving internal and clinical applications
• Design the data pipelines and storage tiers that feed model training on terabyte scale pathology imagery

Hybrid cloud and platform architecture

• Own cloud architecture for our custom applications, primarily on Azure with some AWS, including Arkana Connect and our analytics platforms
• Design the target state hybrid model and the migration path from legacy on premises systems, keeping workloads where they perform and comply best
• Set Infrastructure as Code, networking, and automation standards for the team

Technical leadership

• Serve as the escalation point for the most complex infrastructure problems
• Mentor and raise the technical ceiling of the infrastructure team through design reviews, pairing, and standards
• Advise the Director of Technology Operations on technology selection, vendor evaluation, and roadmap

Security and compliance by design

• Architect infrastructure that meets HIPAA and HITRUST requirements as a first class constraint, working closely with our InfoSec practice
• Design backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity architecture for clinical operations

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of deep infrastructure and systems engineering experience; there is no upper bound, and we welcome deeply experienced candidates
• Expert level cloud platform knowledge, with deep Azure experience strongly preferred and AWS familiarity a plus, alongside genuine comfort with physical infrastructure: servers, storage, networking, power, and cooling
• A track record of owning architecture, not just operating it: designs you can point to, trade offs you can defend
• Hands on mastery of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar), containerization, and modern automation
• Experience in healthcare or another regulated environment, or the judgment to operate in one

Bonus Points

• GPU cluster, HPC, or ML infrastructure experience
• Experience self hosting or serving large models (vLLM, Triton, or similar)
• Storage and networking design for high throughput imaging or scientific workloads
• Relevant certifications preferred: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, AWS Solutions Architect Professional, NVIDIA-Certified Professional, or equivalent

Location and Schedule

This position is onsite at our Little Rock headquarters. The hardware is here, the lab is here, and the team is here. The schedule is Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm, onsite in Little Rock, Arkansas.

What we offer: We know that health is more than doctor visits and life is more than work. We work hard at Arkana but in turn provide competitive salaries and generous benefit offerings.

Specifically, we offer the following benefits to full-time employees:

• Competitive salary
• Generous paid time off and Paid Holidays
• Minimal cost health insurance for you and affordable options for your family
• 401(k) with immediate eligibility and match
• Company-paid life insurance
• Company-paid long term disability coverage
• Affordable vision and dental plans
• Flexible Spending Account or Health Savings Account availability
• Wellness plan and complimentary yoga classes
• Monthly in-office massages and employer-sponsored lunches

Please see Careers for further information.