Senior Software Engineer

upboundext; United States; Remote; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly role

Exposure to global open-source kubernb

Open-source project involvement

Job summary

upboundext is seeking a senior software engineer to design and operate a multi-control-plane platform for provisioning and adapting cloud and on-prem infrastructure. The role spans product development, production operations, and open-source contributions, with emphasis on reliability at scale across SaaS and self-hosted deployments.

You will build Go-based operators, integrate with Kubernetes APIs, and drive incidents through to resolution while collaborating with open-source communities.

Qualifications

• Production-scale Go-based systems experience is required.
• Expertise with Kubernetes controllers and API server concerns.
• Strong debugging across distributed systems and tracing.
• Customer-facing problem solving and incident resolution.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate multi-tenant SaaS platform across clouds.
• Build and maintain Go operators and controllers.
• Investigate distributed system issues and performance bottlenecks.
• Publish design docs and post-incident reviews.
• Deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot services with observability.
• Develop tooling for debugging customer environments.
• Support self-hosted deployment releases and customer deployments.
• Participate in on-call rotations and drive incidents to resolution.
• Contribute to open-source Kubernetes framework.

Skills

Go

Kubernetes

Observability

Incident response

Distributed systems

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Kubernetes API

Job description

Role overview

A senior software engineer role focused on building and operating a multi-control-plane management platform that helps enterprises provision and adapt cloud and on-premises infrastructure. The position spans product development, production operations, and open-source contributions, with a strong emphasis on reliability at scale across both SaaS and self-hosted deployments.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate a multi-tenant SaaS platform managing thousands of control planes across cloud and on-prem environments
• Develop and maintain Go-based operators, controllers, and add-ons that integrate with Kubernetes APIs, with a focus on observability and debuggability
• Investigate complex distributed systems issues including resource reconciliation, multi-control-plane scenarios, and performance bottlenecks
• Author design documents for new initiatives and detailed post-incident reviews that drive system improvements
• Deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot Kubernetes services in production using metrics, logs, and distributed traces
• Build and maintain operational tooling for debugging customer environments, analyzing control plane health, and automating incident response
• Support the release lifecycle for self-hosted distributions, including diagnosing issues in customer-managed deployments
• Participate in on-call rotations and drive incidents through to resolution
• Contribute to open-source projects, including a widely adopted Kubernetes control plane framework

Requirements

• Experience operating production cloud services at scale, including monitoring, alerting, incident response, and continuous reliability improvement
• Strong debugging skills across distributed systems with hands-on use of observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and distributed tracing
• Experience building controllers that interact with the Kubernetes API server, including troubleshooting reconciliation loops, managing API rate limits, and optimizing controller performance
• Comfort working directly with customers to understand, reproduce, and resolve complex technical issues in their environments
• Proficiency in Go for production systems that interface with Kubernetes
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a track record of taking ownership beyond a narrow lane during incidents

Nice to have

• Experience writing documentation, user guides, runbooks, or technical blog posts to support new features
• Familiarity with usage-based product models and growth-stage, product-led environments

Benefits and work setup

• Remote-friendly role with a focus on candidates based in or able to work from the San Francisco Bay Area or Seattle markets
• Opportunity to shape the systems and strategy that drive predictable, scalable growth
• Engagement with global open-source communities and enterprise platform engineering teams