Senior Cloud Infra Engineer — Kubernetes & Automation

Zipline; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Medical, dental and vision insurance

Paid time off

Job summary

Zipline is seeking an experienced Infrastructure Engineer to design, build, and operate foundational infrastructure powering our global drone delivery network. You will own core platform capabilities, manage deployments, observability, and runtime environments across cloud and on-prem environments.

In this role you’ll operate Zipline’s Kubernetes clusters, implement IaC, partner with product and operations teams, and push for reliability and automation across a fast-changing, safety-critical

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional experience designing, implementing and deploying cloud platforms.
• Hands-on experience operating production systems, not just provisioning them.
• Comfort working across the stack from cloud APIs and Kubernetes controllers down to Linux, networking, and runtime behavior.
• A bias toward automation, software-defined infrastructure, and eliminating repeated human toil.
• Strong debugging instincts for distributed systems under time pressure.
• Clear written and verbal communication across software, hardware, operations, and business teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate foundational infrastructure used by engineering teams across Zipline.
• Own core platform capabilities across deployments, infrastructure as code, observability, networking, service-to-service communication, and runtime environments.
• Operate and evolve Zipline-managed Kubernetes clusters, including cluster lifecycle, reliability, scalability, security, and developer ergonomics.
• Build software and tooling that make infrastructure easier, safer, and faster for engineering teams to use.
• Partner with product, robotics, autonomy, fleet management, data, and operations teams to understand their infrastructure needs and turn recurring pain into durable platform abstractions.
• Improve the reliability and debuggability of distributed systems that span cloud services, physical infrastructure, and globally deployed operations.
• Evaluate new technologies pragmatically, separating durable leverage from hype.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for core infrastructure and improve the systems so on-call gets quieter over time.
• Raise the technical bar through design reviews, operational reviews, documentation, mentoring, and interviews.

Skills

Cloud platform design

Production systems operations

Kubernetes

Linux

Automation

Self-hosted tooling

Distributed systems debugging

Communication

Tools

AWS

OnPrem servers

Kubernetes

Kafka

Job description

Zipline is seeking an experienced Infrastructure Engineer to design, build, and operate foundational infrastructure powering our global drone delivery network. You will own core platform capabilities, manage deployments, observability, and runtime environments across cloud and on-prem environments.

In this role you’ll operate Zipline’s Kubernetes clusters, implement IaC, partner with product and operations teams, and push for reliability and automation across a fast-changing, safety-critical