Senior Datacenter Automation Engineer (Kubernetes & Infra)

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

Job summary

Zipline is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Infrastructure team in South San Francisco. You will own the datacenter compute and storage lifecycle, from bare-metal provisioning to Kubernetes lifecycle, while shaping automation to speed deployments and reduce manual work.

You will drive reliability with SLIs/SLOs, lead incident management for flight-critical infra, and implement monitoring, capacity planning, and cost controls across the global platform.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering experience with at least 4 years owning production datacenter, virtualization, or infrastructure automation systems.
• Deep, hands-on expertise with bare-metal provisioning and imaging (PXE/iPXE, IPMI, Redfish), hypervisors (KVM/qemu, ESXi or equivalent), and storage systems (Ceph, NVMeoF, SAN) at scale.
• Proven Kubernetes operations experience: cluster provisioning, upgrades, control-plane HA, kubeadm/cluster API or equivalent, CNI and CSI troubleshooting, and workload scheduling at multi-cluster scale.
• Production-grade automation and coding skills in one or more languages (Python, Go, or Rust) and experience with CI/CD pipelines, Terraform/Ansible/Helm, and GitOps practices.
• Strong networking fundamentals: VLANs, BGP/EVPN at leaf/spine, LACP, routing, and network troubleshooting for cluster networking and storage fabrics.
• On-call and incident experience: you have owned postmortems, SLIs/SLOs, and driven reliability improvements under operational pressure.
• Physical datacenter readiness: able to work on-site in South San Francisco HQ with regular in-office cadence, plus occasional travel to partner datacenters or field sites and hands-on rack/cable/repair work when required.
• Security and safety mindset: experience operating in regulated or safety-sensitive environments, following change control and audit processes.
• Clear communication and cross-team ownership: you will partner with flight software, field ops, hardware, and SRE teams and must translate operational needs into automated, testable systems.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end lifecycle for datacenter compute and storage: bare-metal provisioning, hypervisor management, SAN/NVMe storage clusters, network configuration, and Kubernetes cluster lifecycle.
• Design, build, and operate automation that reduces manual setup time and increases deployment velocity: PXE/firmware workflows, dynamic inventory, image generation, fleet-wide configuration drift detection, and automated recovery playbooks.
• Deliver measurable reliability and scale improvements: set SLIs/SLOs for provisioning time, node commissioning success rate, cluster upgrade success rate, and mean time to recover (MTTR); own meeting those targets.
• Lead cross-functional runbook and incident ownership for infra incidents affecting flight operations or telemetry: on-call rotation, incident commander for datacenter platform incidents, postmortems and action items.
• Instrument and maintain monitoring, alerting, and dashboards for hardware health, hypervisor performance, storage latency, Kubernetes control plane health, and cluster autoscaling behavior.
• Implement cost, capacity, and lifecycle management: capacity planning for compute/storage, automated reclamation, firmware/BIOS/hypervisor patch pipelines, and cold-standby / failover procedures for critical systems.
• Execute hands-on tasks when required: racking and cabling in datacenters, troubleshooting hardware failures, capture forensic logs, and coordinate physical repairs with vendors and field ops.

Skills

Datacenter infrastructure

Bare-metal provisioning

KVM/qemu virtualization

ESXi

Ceph

NVMeoF

Kubernetes operations

CI/CD pipelines

Python

Go

Rust

Terraform

Ansible

Helm

GitOps

Networking fundamentals

VLANs/BGP/EVPN

On-call/incidents

Tools

PXE/iPXE

IPMI/Redfish

KVM

SAN

Hypervisor management

Job description

Zipline is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Infrastructure team in South San Francisco. You will own the datacenter compute and storage lifecycle, from bare-metal provisioning to Kubernetes lifecycle, while shaping automation to speed deployments and reduce manual work.

You will drive reliability with SLIs/SLOs, lead incident management for flight-critical infra, and implement monitoring, capacity planning, and cost controls across the global platform.