Senior Kubernetes Engineer for Agentic Science Platform

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Menlo Park (CA); Hybrid; USD 162,779 - 221,466; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental plan

Vision plan

Tuition reimbursement

Conference funding

On-site amenities

Paid vacation

Job summary

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is seeking a Senior Kubernetes Engineer to design and implement a scalable, next‑generation platform tailored for scientific and agentic workflows. You’ll work within the AUS group to enable autonomous AI‑driven pipelines, spanning on‑premises, hybrid cloud, and multi‑cluster environments.

You will partner with researchers and data scientists to craft requirements for large language model‑driven and reinforcement learning agents, while building observability,

Qualifications

• Minimum 8 years of software or infrastructure engineering experience with distributed systems.
• Minimum 4 years of hands‑on experience designing, deploying, and operating Kubernetes in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in Python and/or Go; comfort reading and contributing to multi‑language codebases.
• Deep experience with container orchestration, networking, storage, and security in Kubernetes environments.
• Hands‑on experience with Infrastructure‑as‑Code and GitOps tooling.
• Demonstrated ability to design and operate high‑throughput or real‑time data processing pipelines at scale.
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline design and implementation.
• Solid understanding of observability practices and tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate highly available Kubernetes‑based platforms optimized for scientific and agentic workloads.
• Architect scalable solutions for high‑throughput data pipelines, real‑time streaming, and batch scientific computing.
• Design and implement platform primitives for agentic workflow orchestration—enabling autonomous, multi‑step AI‑driven pipelines that support experimental science.
• Develop cloud‑native architectures supporting on‑premises, hybrid cloud, and multi‑cluster deployments.
• Build and maintain Infrastructure‑as‑Code using Helm, Kustomize, and GitOps workflows.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies and patterns that advance the platform's capabilities for the scientific community.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Python/Go

Observability

CI/CD

High-throughput pipelines

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Loki

Helm

Kustomize

GitOps

Argo Workflows

Job description

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is seeking a Senior Kubernetes Engineer to design and implement a scalable, next‑generation platform tailored for scientific and agentic workflows. You’ll work within the AUS group to enable autonomous AI‑driven pipelines, spanning on‑premises, hybrid cloud, and multi‑cluster environments.

You will partner with researchers and data scientists to craft requirements for large language model‑driven and reinforcement learning agents, while building observability,