Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)

About the Role

Join an early-stage cloud-native startup building a next-generation platform that abstracts Kubernetes complexity while preserving its full power. As a Platform Engineer, you'll work closely with the founding team to design core platform features, GitOps workflows, and the infrastructure layer that makes multi-cluster management intuitive for developers. This is a high-impact, early-team opportunity where your contributions will directly shape the product and architecture.

What You'll Do

• Build and extend core platform features using Go, including custom Kubernetes operators and controllers.
• Design and implement GitOps workflows with ArgoCD to streamline and automate continuous deployment.
• Develop infrastructure-as-code patterns using Terraform and Helm to provision and manage clusters.
• Work on distributed storage solutions using Ceph and WEKA for high-performance, scalable storage.
• Create observability and monitoring systems with Prometheus and Grafana to surface cluster health and performance metrics.
• Build and optimize container networking with Cilium for network security and observability.
• Design and implement federated Kubernetes architectures for multi-cluster management.
• Build automation tooling to reduce 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.
• Proficiency in Go and Kubernetes, with hands-on experience building developer tools or infrastructure products.
• Experience with ArgoCD and CI/CD pipelines and automation workflows.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their managed Kubernetes offerings.
• Experience with containerization, networking, and cloud-native architectures.
• Self-directed, hungry to learn, and comfortable operating with autonomy.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with distributed storage solutions such as Ceph or WEKA.
• Experience with Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or Kubespray for infrastructure provisioning and orchestration.
• Background with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd) or CNI plugins.
• Contributions to Kubernetes ecosystem tools or open-source projects.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 USD annually
• Visa sponsorship available

Location

This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be willing and able to work in person in San Francisco.