Cloud - Bare Metal Infrastructure Engineer

Render; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

4 weeks paid vacation

14 weeks parental leave

Health, dental, and vision insurance

401K plan

Wellness lifestyle stipend

Cell phone and internet subsidy

Commuter benefits in Bay Area

Job summary

Render is seeking an infrastructure engineer to design and operate a bare metal fleet across datacenters and colocation sites. You will own automation, scale the initial site to thousands of hosts, and drive reliability and performance from the metal up.

You’ll partner with network engineering and the Kubernetes platform team, build capacity-request interfaces, maintain a single source of truth for hardware and software, and implement production-grade lifecycle automation with strong guardrails.

Qualifications

• Hands‑on experience building and operating automation for bare metal fleets in datacenters or colo
• Experience with physical hardware and colo providers
• Strong Go or Python and system design with idempotent actions
• Deep Linux knowledge and networking fundamentals
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and fleet interfaces
• Experience debugging and operating through real hardware failures
• Clear communication and comfort with ambiguity
• Willingness to push back on plans when needed

Responsibilities

• Take first colocation site from empty cage to production workloads and scale to multiple sites
• Design server deployment flow from loading dock to production (netboot, imaging, BMC discovery, identity)
• Collaborate with network engineering on fleet needs from out‑of‑band management to production connectivity
• Build interfaces for the Kubernetes platform team to request capacity, monitor health, and coordinate maintenance
• Own the fleet's source of truth for hardware, software, and physical environment
• Automate full server lifecycle including burn‑in, remediation, firmware rollout, and RMA
• Create production‑grade automation with guardrails to prevent destructive actions
• Shape technical and operational direction of the bare metal platform and help hire the team

Skills

Bare metal fleets

Linux fundamentals

Networking fundamentals

Go or Python

Kubernetes basics

colo/datacenter experience

System design with idempotence

Failure handling

Tools

NetBox

Nautobot

Ironic/Metal3

Tinkerbell

MAAS

Job description

At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms—so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure.

Unlike complex hyperscalers or ephemeral edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you’re building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users.

Our platform is trusted by over 7 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $260M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive—designed for the speed of modern AI development.

We’re a diverse and talented team that values craft, velocity, and user experience. If you’re excited to help shape the future of the intelligent cloud and empower developers everywhere, we’d love to hear from you.

Applying to Render

We're seeking candidates who possess high integrity, humility, and an insatiable drive to learn. Through reasoned discussions and continuous feedback, we strive to improve both individually and collectively. We foster an environment of mutual trust and respect, empowering effective debate to achieve the best outcomes for our customers and team.

We especially encourage members of underrepresented groups in the tech community to apply and understand that not all successful candidates will meet each requirement listed.

Our interview process is unique to each role, and we value the candidate experience just as much as our customer experience. We hope your conversations with us reflect a thoughtful process that is illuminative, enjoyable, and respectful of your time.

About the Role

Most infrastructure engineers never get to build a cloud from the metal up. At Render, you will. Developers and businesses around the world run their apps on Render, and we are building our own bare metal footprint to give them better performance and economics. You'll help take our first colocation site from an empty cage to production workloads, then scale that foundation as we expand our physical presence to thousands of hosts over the coming years.

You'll join a small, experienced team with real ownership. You'll partner closely with network engineering and our Kubernetes platform team, and the decisions you make now will become the template for every site that follows.

What You'll Do

• Take our first colocation site from empty cage to production workloads, then scale what you build as we grow to more sites and thousands of hosts

• Design how servers go from the loading dock to production with minimal human touch: netboot, imaging, BMC-driven discovery, and host identity

• Partner with network engineering on what the fleet needs from the network, from out-of-band management to production connectivity

• Build the interface our Kubernetes platform team uses to request capacity, see host health, and coordinate maintenance, so consuming bare metal feels as easy as consuming cloud

• Own the fleet's source of truth for hardware, software, and the physical environment

• Automate the full server lifecycle, from burn-in and acceptance testing through remediation, staged firmware rollout, and RMA

• Build automation like a production system, with guardrails on destructive actions and designs that survive site-level failure

• Shape the technical and operational direction of our bare metal platform, from build-vs-buy decisions to how we operate thousands of hosts, and help hire the team that runs it

What We're Looking For

• Hands‑on experience building and operating automation for bare metal fleets in datacenters or colocation

• Both sides of the work: time with physical hardware and colo providers, and modern, software‑driven fleet management

• Strong Go or Python, and experience designing systems with reconciliation loops and idempotent, failure‑tolerant actions

• Depth below the abstraction: you know what your tools are doing under the hood and can debug them when they fail

• Experience operating through real failures, such as bad hardware batches, flapping BMCs, or a rollout you had to halt

• Deep Linux knowledge and solid networking fundamentals (DHCP, PXE, DNS, BGP)

• Working knowledge of Kubernetes, enough to design the interface between the fleet and the clusters that run on it

• Clear communication, comfort with ambiguity, and the willingness to push back on a plan when something doesn't add up

Nice‑to‑Haves

• Operating bare metal fleets at a scale of thousands of hosts

• Experience on a bare metal or datacenter build‑out from its early days

• Running a hybrid environment, or moving workloads between public cloud and owned hardware

• DCIM/IPAM tools such as NetBox or Nautobot, or provisioning stacks such as Ironic/Metal3, Tinkerbell, or MAAS

• Building reconcilers or state machines for physical infrastructure

• Hardware depth: component diagnostics, burn‑in tooling, firmware, or Redfish and IPMI at fleet scale

• Building internal platforms or APIs used by other infrastructure teams

• Based near our colocation sites, or able to visit them regularly

If this role excites you but you don’t meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you—your unique experience might be just what we need.

Benefits

• 4 weeks of paid vacation.

• 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.

• Long‑term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.

• 100% employer‑paid medical coverage and 99% employer‑paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well.

• Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.

• Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.

• Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.

• Continuous learning benefits & related support.

This position is generally not eligible for new visasponsorship. At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization.

Render is an equal‑opportunity employer. We know that employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, product, and community to flourish. We make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional, and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy‑related condition, marital status, height and/or weight.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

We encourage all who are interested to apply. We can't wait to hear from you!

Render — CCPA Applicant Privacy Notice

Render — GDPR Applicant Privacy Notice