Senior Managed Kubernetes Engineer — Hybrid AI Cloud

Lambda Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Wellness stipend

Commuter stipend

401k with company match

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Lambda is building the AI cloud infrastructure leader in the world. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Managed Kubernetes (Mk8s) team, shaping the architecture, reliability, and automation of our Kubernetes-based platform.

As part of the Orchestration team you will work on GPU-aware scheduling, control plane services, and platform tooling, collaborating across teams to deliver scalable, production-grade infrastructure for AI workloads.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering with ownership of significant scope.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes internals: controllers, schedulers, operators, CRDs, CSI, CNI, and extension patterns.
• Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals — fault tolerance, graceful degradation, and failure handling in large-scale environments.
• Experience operating the control plane and low-level pieces of large-scale Kubernetes clusters.
• Experience with observability at scale: Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing, and building actionable alerting systems.
• Strong programming skills in Go and Python; ability to collaborate effectively on shared codebases.
• Solid knowledge of Linux systems, networking, containers, and cloud infrastructure.
• Take pride in owning and delivering core components of products and platforms.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable control plane services, operators, and custom Kubernetes controllers; develop automation in Go/Python for end-to-end cluster lifecycle management.
• Build GPU-aware orchestration systems, working within the platform architecture to support GPU scheduling and resource allocation
• Partner with the Network team on networking solutions for AI workloads: CNI integration (Cilium, Multus), high-performance fabrics (InfiniBand, RoCE), RDMA, and GPUDirect
• Write resilient systems that handle failure gracefully — timeouts, retries, backoff, and degraded-mode operation — across large-scale distributed environments
• Develop platform services for inference: model serving infrastructure, autoscaling based on inference load, and multi-model deployment patterns
• Build internal tools and CLIs that let ML/AI teams deploy and monitor their own inference services
• Support and debug production issues through on-call rotation

Skills

Kubernetes internals

Distributed systems

Go programming

Python programming

Linux systems

Networking

Cloud infrastructure

Observability

On-call rotation

Ownership

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

NVIDIA GPU Operator

DCGM

NCCL tuning

Job description

Lambda is building the AI cloud infrastructure leader in the world. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Managed Kubernetes (Mk8s) team, shaping the architecture, reliability, and automation of our Kubernetes-based platform.

As part of the Orchestration team you will work on GPU-aware scheduling, control plane services, and platform tooling, collaborating across teams to deliver scalable, production-grade infrastructure for AI workloads.