Senior Backend Engineer — Kubernetes & Slurm Infra (Go/Python)

Lightning AI; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Coverage

Equity

401(k) matching

Unlimited PTO

Winter Break

Parental Leave

Learning allowance

Wellness stipend

Sabbatical

Flexible Work

In-Office Meals

Job summary

Lightning AI, the company behind PyTorch Lightning, seeks a Senior Backend Engineer for its Managed Services team. You will design and build backend services, automation, and control planes to provision and operate Kubernetes and Slurm clusters across our GPU fleet.

This role emphasizes distributed systems, cloud-native infra, and large-scale operations, solving challenging problems while improving reliability, security, and observability. Hybrid US-based with preferred hubs.

Qualifications

• Significant professional experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems using Go or Python.
• Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes or Slurm, including operating large-scale production environments.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and production infrastructure.
• Experience designing and building scalable backend services, APIs, and automation for infrastructure or platform operations.
• Strong understanding of networking, storage, and cloud infrastructure fundamentals.
• Familiarity with observability, CI/CD, testing, production operations, and incident response.
• Ability to own complex technical projects while collaborating effectively across engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services in Go or Python that power Lightning AI's managed infrastructure platform.
• Develop control plane services that provision, orchestrate, and manage Kubernetes and Slurm clusters across large-scale GPU infrastructure.
• Build distributed systems that automate cluster lifecycle management, workload scheduling, infrastructure provisioning, and platform operations.
• Develop platform capabilities using Kubernetes APIs, controllers, operators, and other cloud-native technologies.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, security, and observability of our managed platform through automation and operational excellence.
• Diagnose and resolve complex production issues across Kubernetes, distributed systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, AI, and platform engineering teams to shape the future of our cloud platform.
• Contribute to technical design, architecture, mentoring, engineering best practices, and on-call operations.

Skills

Go

Python

Kubernetes

Slurm

Distributed systems

Cloud-native

Networking

Tools

Terraform

Crossplane

Helm

Argo CD

Flux

Kustomize

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Lightning AI, the company behind PyTorch Lightning, seeks a Senior Backend Engineer for its Managed Services team. You will design and build backend services, automation, and control planes to provision and operate Kubernetes and Slurm clusters across our GPU fleet.

This role emphasizes distributed systems, cloud-native infra, and large-scale operations, solving challenging problems while improving reliability, security, and observability. Hybrid US-based with preferred hubs.