Software Engineer (Cloud Platforms)
Location - San Mateo, CA (Hybrid – 4 Days Onsite, Fridays Remote)
Compensation - $180,000 – $280,000 Base + Competitive Equity
Visa - Visa sponsorship available on a case-by-case basis
Company Stage - High-Growth VC-Backed Startup (Founded by UC Berkeley PhDs & Databricks Founders)
Industry - AI Infrastructure, Cloud Platforms, Kubernetes, Multicloud Computing
About the Company
The company is building the future of multicloud AI infrastructure by providing a unified control plane that enables organizations to run, manage, and optimize AI workloads across cloud providers and on-premise environments.
Originally developed as a UC Berkeley research project, the platform has become one of the fastest-growing infrastructure products in AI, powering production workloads for Fortune 500 companies and leading AI-native startups.
The platform abstracts away cloud complexity and provides a portable, cost-optimized, and highly available interface for managing large-scale AI compute across more than 17 cloud providers and Kubernetes environments.
With adoption growing more than 600% in the past year and strong backing from world-class investors and technical leaders, the company is scaling rapidly and building a world-class engineering team focused on distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and AI platforms.
This role will own critical components of the commercial cloud platform and help architect the next generation of multicloud infrastructure for AI workloads.
What You'll Do
- Architect and build the commercial cloud platform from the ground up
- Design and implement scalable control plane and data plane systems
- Build tenant management, user management, authentication, and authorization services
- Develop core platform services including APIs, billing systems, monitoring, and platform infrastructure
- Design cloud-native services using Go, Kubernetes, gRPC, and PostgreSQL
- Build highly reliable, secure, and scalable SaaS platform capabilities
- Create systems for monitoring, alerting, observability, and platform operations
- Partner closely with founders and engineering leadership on technical architecture decisions
- Help define the long-term platform strategy and engineering roadmap
- Work on infrastructure powering AI workloads at massive scale across multiple cloud providers
- Drive engineering excellence and help establish platform engineering best practices
Ideal Candidate Background
Experience Requirements
- 6+ years of experience as a backend, platform, or infrastructure engineer
- Experience building SaaS products from 0-to-1 rather than maintaining mature systems
- Experience at VC-backed startups during Seed through Series C growth stages
- Experience building core platform services used by customers in production
- Experience designing and shipping scalable distributed systems
- Experience as an early employee at a startup that successfully scaled preferred
- Demonstrated ownership of platform architecture and technical decision-making
- Strong startup builder mentality with a bias toward execution
Technical Requirements
- Strong Go engineering experience preferred
- Production Kubernetes experience (required)
- Experience building cloud-native services and distributed systems
- Experience with gRPC and service-oriented architectures
- Strong PostgreSQL experience
- Experience using Terraform or infrastructure-as-code tools
- Experience designing SaaS platform architecture
- Strong backend system design fundamentals
- Experience with monitoring, observability, and production operations
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and multicloud environments
- Strong debugging and performance optimization skills
Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field
- Strong academic background from a top engineering program preferred
Soft Skills
- High ownership mentality
- Strong communication and collaboration skills
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity
- Startup-minded builder
- Strong product and business judgment
- Ability to execute independently
- Customer-focused engineering mindset
- Passion for solving complex infrastructure challenges
Preferred Backgrounds
- Cloud infrastructure startups
- Developer platform companies
- Kubernetes-native organizations
- SaaS platform engineering teams
- Infrastructure software startups
- Distributed systems companies
- Early-stage venture-backed startups
- Engineers who joined startups during 0-to-1 phases
Compensation & Benefits
- Base Salary: $180,000 – $280,000
- Competitive Equity Package
- Significant ownership over platform architecture
- Direct collaboration with founders and leadership
- Opportunity to shape a category-defining infrastructure platform
- Exposure to cutting-edge AI infrastructure challenges
- Hybrid work environment in San Mateo
- Rapid career growth opportunities
- Opportunity to build systems powering the future of AI compute
Why Join
This is an opportunity to help build the infrastructure layer powering the next generation of AI applications.
You'll work on highly technical distributed systems challenges involving Kubernetes, cloud platforms, multicloud orchestration, scalability, and reliability while helping organizations manage some of the largest AI workloads in production.
As an early platform engineer, you'll have significant influence over architecture, product direction, and engineering culture while building technology that sits at the center of the rapidly expanding AI ecosystem.
