Senior Kubernetes Architect for AI Infrastructure

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

Job summary

Firmus Technologies seeks a Senior Kubernetes Engineer to own backend infrastructure for the AI Factory fleet. You will design, build, and operate production-grade clusters and automation across GPU-accelerated bare-metal environments, driving security, observability, and reliability at scale.

You will lead platform engineering standards, collaborate with AI platforms, security, and networking teams, and mentor engineers while delivering resilient multi-tenant solutions.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in infrastructure/platform engineering with production Kubernetes ownership.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes internals (API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager, kubelet).
• Experience designing and operating multi-cluster Kubernetes on bare metal/private/hybrid infra.
• Go and/or Rust with practical Python and Bash skills; building Kubernetes operators recommended.
• Strong Linux systems knowledge and networking expertise (CNI, DNS, LB, policy).
• GitOps and CI/CD expertise with Terraform, Ansible, Argo CD, Flux, and CI tools.
• Security/governance: RBAC, secrets, image security, policy-as-code, isolation.
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, logs, traces; capacity planning.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the Kubernetes platform reference architecture across management and workload clusters.
• Build and maintain backend services, APIs, controllers, operators, and automation to manage clusters.
• Automate bare-metal Kubernetes deployment and lifecycle with IaaC and provisioning tools.
• Design and operate cluster networking, including CNI, ingress, DNS, load balancing, and service mesh.
• Define persistent storage and data-service patterns (Ceph, CSI, object storage, DR).
• Integrate NVIDIA GPU and Network Operators for multi-node AI workloads.
• Establish GitOps and CI/CD patterns for platform software with safe testing and rollouts.
• Incorporate security with IAM, RBAC, secrets, policy-as-code, and image security.
• Define SLOs, observability, and diagnostics for complex distributed systems.
• Mentor senior engineers and participate in cross-team architectural decisions.

Skills

Kubernetes

Go

Python

Bash

Linux

GitOps

CI/CD

Cluster API

kubeadm

Redfish

PXE

Ironic

Metal3

NVIDIA GPU Operator

RBAC

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or related discipline

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Argo CD

Flux

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Jenkins

Cluster API

kubeadm

Job description

Firmus Technologies seeks a Senior Kubernetes Engineer to own backend infrastructure for the AI Factory fleet. You will design, build, and operate production-grade clusters and automation across GPU-accelerated bare-metal environments, driving security, observability, and reliability at scale.

You will lead platform engineering standards, collaborate with AI platforms, security, and networking teams, and mentor engineers while delivering resilient multi-tenant solutions.