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.