Platform Engineer (12x Openings)

Volta; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in Volta

Retirement contributions

Health benefits

Generous vacation days

Competitive salary

Job summary

Volta is expanding its Platform Engineering teams in Palo Alto to own the full stack from bare metal to higher-level services. You will work on Kubernetes operators, API surfaces, and scalable platform features, collaborating across product, security, and operations.

As a Platform Engineer you design, build, and run production-grade platform components, participate in on-call rotations, and drive reliability and performance improvements across the stack.

Qualifications

• 3 to 5 years of software engineering experience with a focus on infrastructure or platform systems.
• Solid backend or systems programming in a production environment using Python, Go, or Rust.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes internals: the control loop model, CRDs, controllers, and operators.
• Comfortable working close to the infrastructure layer: Linux, networking fundamentals, and distributed systems behavior.
• Experience designing, building, and versioning production-grade APIs with backward compatibility.
• Experience operating what you build: debugging production systems and on-call or incident response.
• Strong engineering fundamentals: clean code, testing, version control, code review, and CI/CD practices.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement Kubernetes operators and controllers that manage the lifecycle of platform resources.
• Collaborate with product teams to translate roadmaps into platform capabilities.
• Identify operational pain points and turn them into scalable platform features.
• Integrate security guidance into platform controls and remediate findings.
• Instrument services and build tooling for observability and health visibility.
• Own production services, participate in on-call rotations, and drive post-incident fixes.
• Maintain clean interfaces and versioning for dependencies used by teams or customers.
• Participate in code reviews and cross-team technical design discussions in an Agile environment.

Skills

Backend programming

Kubernetes internals

Linux networking

APIs design

On-call / incident response

CI/CD practices

Code review

Tools

Kubernetes

Prometheus

CI/CD tooling

Job description

About Volta

Volta is the category-defining, fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform – from capital to clusters to software, under a founder-led enterprise. Our mission is The Utility of Compute™: AI infrastructure as dependable and available as electricity, for every organization that needs it. Launched with a $10B strategic partnership with one of the leading frontier AI labs, a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and a $5B AI Infrastructure Fund, Volta is building the infrastructure layer of the AI era from the ground up. We are 100+ people across London, Palo Alto, and New York, with rapid growth expectations to hundreds.

About The Role

Volta builds and operates large scale GPU compute infrastructure for AI workloads. Our platform is Kubernetes-native, spans multiple regions, and delivers virtual machines, storage, and networking through a fully automated infrastructure stack built on custom Kubernetes operators.

We are building out several platform engineering teams that together own the full stack, from managed bare metal and IaaS through to higher-order platform services. Each team owns a different part of that stack: compute, networking, storage, the control plane and API layer, confidential computing, and the customer-facing surface. The area you work in depends on the team you join and your prior expertise, so no single engineer is expected to cover all of it.

Platform Engineers work at the intersection of infrastructure and software development. Across every team, you will translate three key inputs into durable platform capabilities: product roadmap requirements from the product team, operational learnings from the bring-up teams, and security guidance from the security engineering team. The output of this role is production platform code, not configuration, not runbooks.

What You Will Be Doing

Common across every platform engineering team:

• Design and implement Kubernetes operators and controllers that manage the lifecycle of platform resources.

• Work closely with the product team to turn roadmap requirements into the platform capabilities that support them.

• Collaborate with the bring-up teams to identify operational pain points and turn them into scalable platform features.

• Integrate security guidance from the security engineering team into platform-level controls, and remediate findings at the platform layer.

• Treat observability as a platform concern: instrument services, define meaningful metrics, and build tooling that gives the team visibility into platform health.

• Own the services you build in production, including participation in an on-call rotation, incident response, and the follow-up work that closes structural gaps rather than only the immediate issue.

• Hold to clean interface and versioning practice on anything other teams or customers depend on, including disciplined handling of breaking changes.

• Participate in code review, technical design discussions, and cross-team collaboration in an Agile (Kanban or Scrum) environment.

Depending on your team and background, you will go deep in some of the following:

• Control plane and APIs: improve and extend the API layer between user-facing services and the underlying platform, with disciplined versioning and backward compatibility.

• Compute: build and operate the lifecycle of virtualized and bare metal compute resources.

• Storage: provisioning workflows, attachment reliability, performance tuning, and failure handling.

• Confidential computing: build and extend confidential computing capabilities across the stack, from secure bare metal and confidential VMs to Confidential Containers (CoCo).

• Customer-facing services: the platform surfaces customers interact with directly, including the APIs and interfaces through which they consume capacity, working alongside product and UX.

What You Bring

• 3 to 5 years of software engineering experience, with a meaningful portion spent on infrastructure or platform systems.

• Strong backend or systems programming experience in a production environment. Our working languages are Python, Go, and Rust; we welcome strong engineers from other compiled or object-oriented languages (for example C++, C#, or Java) who are ready to work across our stack as it evolves.

• Solid understanding of Kubernetes internals: the control loop model, CRDs, controllers and operators, and reliable reconciliation logic.

• Comfortable working close to the infrastructure layer: Linux, networking fundamentals, and distributed systems behavior.

• Experience designing, building, and versioning production-grade APIs or service interfaces that other teams depend on, including disciplined handling of breaking changes and backward compatibility.

• Experience operating what you build: debugging production systems, and taking part in on-call or incident response.

• Strong engineering fundamentals: clean code, testing, version control, code review, and CI/CD practices.

Nice to Have (But Not Essential)

None of these are required. Several map to specific teams, so strength in one or more helps us match you to the right one:

• Fluency with AI-assisted development: agentic CLI tools, IDE assistants, and orchestrating multiple coding agents through MCP, skills, or APIs to amplify delivery.

• Depth in Go or Rust beyond working proficiency.

• Familiarity with confidential computing technologies: TEEs, AMD SEV, Intel TDX, or Confidential Containers (CoCo).

• Experience integrating security requirements into platform or infrastructure systems.

• Familiarity with high-performance networking: overlay protocols, BGP, RDMA, or packet-processing frameworks.

• Hands‑on experience with distributed storage systems (Ceph or similar) at an engineering level.

• Background building Kubernetes operators using frameworks such as Kopf, controller‑runtime, or similar.

• Experience with observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or structured logging in distributed systems.

• Experience building SaaS or PaaS layers on top of an IaaS platform.

• Exposure to serverless or inference serving infrastructure.

• Exposure to GPU infrastructure or HPC environments.

• Experience working distributed across time zones with counterparts in other regions.

• REQ-0

What We Offer

At Volta, we believe people do their best work when they feel supported, trusted and able to grow. We're building a company where you can make an impact, keep a healthy balance between work and life, and build a career you're proud of.
As a global team, we do our best to provide great benefits wherever you're based. While some benefits vary by country due to local regulations, we believe looking after our people is simply the right thing to do.

• Competitive salary based on the work you do here, not your previous salary

• Equity in Volta, giving you the opportunity to share in the company's long-term success

• Retirement/pension contributions

• Comprehensive health, wellbeing and insurance benefits

• Generous number of vacation days each year

Equal Opportunity

Volta is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and make employment decisions based on skills, qualifications, experience and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic.

Accessibility

Volta is committed to providing an accessible recruitment experience for all candidates. If you require accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the application or interview process, please contact us at [e-mail]. We will work with you to identify reasonable accommodations that enable you to participate fully in the hiring process.

Candidate Privacy Notice

By applying, you consent to the processing of your personal data for recruitment purposes in accordance with applicable data protection laws, including the UK GDPR, EU GDPR and relevant US state privacy regulations. Your data will be shared only with those involved in the hiring process and will not be used for unrelated purposes. For details, see our Recruitment & Candidate Privacy Notice.

Note to Recruitment Agencies

Volta does not accept unsolicited CVs or candidate profiles from recruitment agencies. Any unsolicited submissions, including those sent directly to hiring managers or employees, will be treated as the property of Volta. No agency fees will be payable unless a valid, signed recruitment agreement is in place, and the agency has been specifically engaged for the relevant vacancy.