Senior Backend Engineer — Kubernetes & Slurm Platform

Lightning AI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive Health Coverage

Meaningful Equity

401(k) matching

Unlimited PTO

Company-Wide Winter Break

Paid Parental & Family Leave

Professional Development

Wellness Benefits

Sabbatical Program

Flexible Work

In-Office Meals

Job summary

Lightning AI seeks a Senior Backend Engineer for its Managed Services team to design, build, and operate backend services powering our GPU infrastructure. You will create control planes that provision and manage Kubernetes and Slurm clusters at scale, turning capacity into production-grade environments for training, inference, and deployment.

You’ll tackle distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and automation, improving reliability, observability, and security while collaborating with

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 infrastructure

CI/CD observability

Networking/storage

Tools

Terraform

Crossplane

Helm

Argo CD

Flux

Kustomize

Job description

Lightning AI seeks a Senior Backend Engineer for its Managed Services team to design, build, and operate backend services powering our GPU infrastructure. You will create control planes that provision and manage Kubernetes and Slurm clusters at scale, turning capacity into production-grade environments for training, inference, and deployment.

You’ll tackle distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and automation, improving reliability, observability, and security while collaborating with