Senior Platform Engineer – Core Infrastructure

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Wellness and commuter stipends

401k Plan with 2% company match

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is seeking a seasoned Platform Engineer to design, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters across AWS and Lambda's data centers. You will own reliability, security, and performance for production workloads while partnering with product teams to build scalable cloud-native services.

This role demands deep Kubernetes knowledge, strong Go or Python skills, and hands-on experience with Terraform or Pulumi, Prometheus, Grafana, and GitOps.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in Platform, Infrastructure, or SRE roles, with production Kubernetes at scale.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes internals and day-2 operations (upgrades, scaling, troubleshooting).
• Strong with Helm, Kustomize, or similar, and GitOps-based delivery.
• Proficient with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent).
• Solid grounding in networking, service meshes, and container runtimes.
• Hands-on with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Strong coding skills in Go or Python for automation and tooling.
• Practical security experience: network policies, secrets management, and image scanning.

Responsibilities

• Architect, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters across AWS and Lambda's bare-metal datacenters.
• Build and maintain automation for cluster lifecycle management - provisioning, upgrades, and scaling.
• Own the reliability, performance, and security of Kubernetes workloads in production.
• Implement observability, logging, and alerting for clusters and critical workloads.
• Partner with product teams to design scalable, cloud-native services and CI/CD pipelines.
• Set the standards for resource management, networking, and RBAC across the platform.
• Lead incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-mortems for platform issues.
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for platform engineering across the org.

Skills

Kubernetes production

Platform/SRE

Helm/Kustomize

GitOps

Infrastructure-as-code

Networking

Observability

Go/Python

Security

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

Helm

Kustomize

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

GitOps tooling

Job description

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of superintelligence. One person, one GPU.

If you'd like to build the world's best AI cloud, join us.

*Note: This position requires presence in our San Francisco, San Jose, or Seattle office location 4 days per week; Lambda's designated work from home day is currently Tuesday.

Engineering at Lambda is responsible for building and scaling our cloud offering. Our scope includes the Lambda website, cloud APIs and systems as well as internal tooling for system deployment, management and maintenance.

What You'll Do

• Architect, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters across AWS and Lambda's bare-metal datacenters.

• Build and maintain automation for cluster lifecycle management - provisioning, upgrades, and scaling.

• Own the reliability, performance, and security of Kubernetes workloads in production.

• Implement observability, logging, and alerting for clusters and critical workloads.

• Partner with product teams to design scalable, cloud-native services and CI/CD pipelines.

• Set the standards for resource management, networking, and RBAC across the platform.

• Lead incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-mortems for platform issues.

• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for platform engineering across the org.

You

• 5+ years in Platform, Infrastructure, or SRE roles, including running Kubernetes in production at scale.

• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes internals and day-2 operations (upgrades, scaling, troubleshooting).

• Strong with Helm, Kustomize, or similar, and GitOps-based delivery.

• Proficient with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent).

• Solid grounding in networking, service meshes, and container runtimes.

• Hands-on with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).

• Strong coding skills in Go or Python for automation and tooling.

• Practical security experience: network policies, secrets management, and image scanning.

Nice to Have

• Experience with multi-cluster, multi-cloud, or hybrid environments.

• Knowledge of GPU scheduling, HPC workloads, or ML/AI infrastructure.

• Experience with workflow orchestration / durable execution frameworks (Temporal, Cadence, or Argo Workflows).

• Exposure to cost optimization and capacity planning for large clusters.

• Contributions to CNCF or Kubernetes open-source projects.

• CKA/CKS certification.

Salary Range Information

The annual salary range for this position has been set based on market data and other factors. However, a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description.

About Lambda

• Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast

• Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove

• We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG

• Our values are publicly available: https://lambda.ai/careers

• We offer generous cash & equity compensation

• Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents

• Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles

• 401k Plan with 2% company match (USA employees)

• Flexible paid time off plan that we all actually use

Equal Opportunity Employer

Lambda is an Equal Opportunity employer. Applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.