Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)

About the Role This is an early-team platform engineering role at a seed-stage AI infrastructure startup building an open-source, GitOps-native distributed operating system on top of Kubernetes. You will work closely with the founding team to design and evolve core platform features, making multi-cluster management intuitive for developers running demanding AI workloads. The work spans the full infrastructure stack, from bare metal to production-grade Kubernetes. 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. 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 cluster storage. Create observability and monitoring systems with Prometheus and Grafana to surface cluster health and performance. 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 that reduces operational overhead for developers running production workloads. What We're Looking For 2 to 5+ years of software development experience, with a strong systems or infrastructure focus. Hands-on proficiency in Go, including writing Go in a Kubernetes environment. Production Kubernetes experience: managing clusters at meaningful scale, writing operators and controllers, working with CRDs. Experience with distributed storage solutions such as Ceph or WEKA. Experience designing federated Kubernetes architectures for multi-cluster management. Familiarity with GitOps workflows and ArgoCD. Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform and Helm; Ansible or Kubespray is a plus. Background with container networking, CNI plugins, or service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd. Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and their managed Kubernetes offerings. Familiarity with observability tooling such as Prometheus and Grafana. Experience with GPU infrastructure or bare metal environments is a strong plus. Contributions to Kubernetes ecosystem tooling or similar open-source infrastructure projects are a bonus. Compensation & Benefits Salary range: $180,000 to $210,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available. Location On-site in San Francisco, California . Candidates must be able to work in person full-time.