Senior Backend Infra Engineer - Kubernetes & IaC

Lyric; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job description

About the Role

At Lyric, we’re building a cutting‑edge platform that powers intelligent supply chain automation at scale. Our infrastructure team lays the foundation for everything we build — providing reliable, secure, and scalable systems to our engineering and ML teams.

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer – Infrastructure to design and build core platform components, including Kubernetes operators, control/data plane services, custom tooling, and infrastructure‑as‑code (IaC) systems.

In this role, you’ll solve tough distributed systems challenges, work close to the orchestration layer, and help scale Lyric’s infrastructure in a cloud‑native, multi‑tenant environment.

What You’ll Do

• Architect and develop Kubernetes operators and controllers to automate and manage Lyric’s platform workloads.
• Design and implement control plane and data plane services that provide orchestration, routing, monitoring, and self‑healing of distributed components.
• Build internal developer tooling and platform APIs to enhance developer productivity and operational excellence.
• Design and maintain IaC frameworks (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi, Crossplane) to provision and manage cloud infrastructure securely and reproducibly.
• Establish and improve observability, reliability, and resilience of critical infrastructure components.
• Work closely with SREs, platform engineers, and application teams to ensure infrastructure meets evolving product needs.
• Contribute to infrastructure architecture and technical direction for scale, security, and developer experience.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience building backend or infrastructure systems, ideally in cloud‑native environments.
• Deep experience with Kubernetes internals, operators/controllers, CRDs, and the Kubernetes API.
• Strong software engineering skills in languages such as Go (preferred), Rust, or Python.
• Hands‑on experience designing distributed systems and working with control plane/data plane architectures.
• Proficiency with IaC tools and practices (Terraform, Pulumi, Crossplane, etc.).
• Solid understanding of containerization, orchestration, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Familiarity with observability (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and operational best practices for production systems.
• Strong problem‑solving, debugging, and performance optimization skills.

Nice to Have

• Experience building platform services in a multi‑tenant SaaS environment.
• Familiarity with service meshes, workload identity, and cloud‑native security patterns.
• Contributions to open‑source infrastructure projects.