Platform Engineer: Kubernetes & Go, Early-Stage Startup SF

Clera Labs, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Clera Labs, Inc. is seeking a Platform Engineer in San Francisco to help build a cloud-native platform that abstracts Kubernetes complexity while maintaining its full power.

You will partner with the founding team to design core platform features, GitOps workflows, and an infrastructure layer for multi-cluster management. You will work on Go-based features, ArgoCD workflows, Terraform/Helm IaC, and observability with Prometheus and Grafana.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of software development experience.
• Proficiency in Go and Kubernetes, with hands-on developer tools experience.
• Experience with ArgoCD and CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiar with AWS, GCP, Azure and their managed Kubernetes offerings.
• Experience with containerization and cloud-native architectures.
• Self-directed, hungry to learn, and comfortable operating with autonomy.

Responsibilities

• Build and extend core platform features using Go, including operators.
• Design and implement GitOps workflows with ArgoCD.
• Develop IaC patterns with Terraform and Helm to provision clusters.
• Work on distributed storage with Ceph and WEKA.
• Create observability with Prometheus and Grafana.
• Build container networking with Cilium for security and observability.
• Design federated Kubernetes architectures for multi-cluster mgmt.
• Build automation tooling to reduce ops overhead for developers.
• Contribute to open-source components and shape platform patterns as an early member.

Skills

Go

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Cloud platforms

Self-motivation

Developer tools

Tools

ArgoCD

Terraform

Helm

Kubespray

Ansible

Istio

Linkerd

Ceph

WEKA

Prometheus

Grafana

Cilium

Job description

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.