Software Engineer, Compute Infrastructure

Render; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

4 weeks paid vacation

Parental leave

Long-term disability & life insurance

401K & employer-paid medical coverage

Wellness & hobby stipends

Commuter benefits in Bay Area

Job summary

Render is building a scalable cloud platform and seeks engineers with deep Kubernetes expertise to design and operate massive compute infrastructure. You will drive performance, reliability, and multi-cloud orchestration, shaping a platform used by millions of developers globally.

Ideal candidates have 7+ years of experience, can code in Go or Rust for infra components, and excel at distributed systems with minimal downtime upgrades. Join us in SF to accelerate AI-native cloud innovations.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and operating large-scale infrastructure.
• Deep expertise operating, scaling, and improving Kubernetes clusters.
• Experience developing Go or Rust components for infra.
• Ability to design, debug, and operate distributed systems.
• Experience planning rapid upgrades with minimal downtime.

Responsibilities

• Own Render's core compute infrastructure across providers and regions.
• Build capabilities for performance, deployability, and reliability.
• Investigate cloud and compute issues across stack from kernel to orchestration.
• Profile, experiment, and tune for improved performance and reliability.
• Collaborate across teams to maintain a stable, secure platform.
• Participate in on-call rotation and incident learning.

Skills

Kubernetes expertise

Go

Rust

Distributed systems design

System performance optimization

On-call / incident response

Tools

Kubernetes orchestration

Job description

At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms—so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure.

Unlike complex hyperscalers or episodic edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you're building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users.

Our platform is trusted by over 6 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $257M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive—designed for the speed of modern AI development.

We’re a diverse and talented team that values craft, velocity, and user experience. If you’re excited to help shape the future of the intelligent cloud and empower developers everywhere, we’d love to hear from you.

Applying to Render

We're seeking candidates who possess high integrity, humility, and an insatiable drive to learn. Through reasoned discussions and continuous feedback, we strive to improve both individually and collectively. We foster an environment of mutual trust and respect, empowering effective debate to achieve the best outcomes for our customers and team.

We especially encourage members of underrepresented groups in the tech community to apply and understand that not all successful candidates will meet each requirement listed.

Our interview process is unique to each role, and we value the candidate experience just as much as our customer experience. We hope your conversations with us reflect a thoughtful process that is illuminative, enjoyable, and respectful of your time.

About the Role

Render's mission is to eliminate the undifferentiated work that goes into building software products by offering an easy-to-use, powerful cloud platform for developer teams of all sizes.

We are scaling rapidly. Our customers have created millions of services on our platform, and the numbers continue to accelerate. Our customers trust us to deliver a secure, reliable and performant cloud — this is our top priority as a company.

By joining us at an early stage, you will design and build the cloud platform you've always wanted for yourself, and make decisions that will shape our product and company, directly impacting developers around the globe.

Render builds and orchestrates a growing number of kubernetes clusters on different hyperscalers and recently, our own hardware. We leverage open source and industry-standard technologies, modifying and extending the core components to meet the unique reliability, performance, and scaling demands of our platform.

We are looking for engineers with deep specialization in cloud and compute infrastructure. We are particularly interested in experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration, micro VMs, controllers, operators, and the automation and self-healing of large scale distributed systems.

Areas of focus for the team this year will unlocking bottlenecks to scale our clusters while also automating the multi-step creation, configuration, testing, and tuning of Render clusters. We will expand Render to new regions, our own bare metal, and start orchestrating micro VMs outside of Kubernetes entirely.

What You'll Do

• Own Render's core compute infrastructure across multiple cloud providers, regions, and data centers. You'll shape how we evolve our compute platform as we rapidly scale.
• Design and build capabilities that give users greater performance and flexibility in how their services are built, deployed, perform, and stay available even when underlying resources go down.
• Investigate challenging cloud and compute issues across the stack, from the kernel and data plane to our kubernetes cluster, control plane, and other orchestration mechanisms.
• Improve the performance and reliability of our infrastructure through systematic profiling, experimentation, and tuning.
• Partner with engineers across the company to build a platform that is stable, predictable, and secure.
• Participate in our on-call rotation. Help continuously improve how we detect, respond to, and learn from incidents.

What We're Looking For

• At least 7 years of experience building and operating large-scale platform or compute infrastructure.
• Deep expertise in operating, scaling, and enhancing Kubernetes clusters or similar resource/container orchestration system.
• Experience developing in Go, Rust, or similar languages to develop custom infrastructure components, scheduling, controllers, that apply business logic to resource management.
• Comfort going broad and deep in a complex systems, making tradeoffs to improve performance and efficiency without sacrificing reliability.
• Strong experience designing, debugging, and operating distributed systems.
• Experience planning and executing rapid, high-risk upgrades, changes with minimal downtime to user services.

Nice-to-Haves

• Background in virtualization technologies like Firecracker, gVisor, Kata, or similar.
• Experience optimizing the performance of node, pod, and container spin-up times.
• Familiarity with eBPF, Linux kernel internals, resource management.
• Comfort securing and isolating workloads in multi-tenant execution environments.

Relevant links from the Render Infrastructure Team

• The Namespaces Scaling Trap (video podcast interview) and related article How We Found 7 TiB of Memory Just Sitting Around
• SEV0 SF 2025 | Boundary Cases: Technical and social challenges in cross-system debugging
• Distributing Global State to Serve over 1 Billion Daily Requests
• Breaking down OpenAI's outage: How to avoid a hidden DNS dependency in Kubernetes
• Kubernetes Informers are so easy... to misuse!

If this role excites you but you don’t meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you—your unique experience might be just what we need.

Benefits

• 4 weeks of paid vacation.
• 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.
• Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.
• 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well.
• Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.
• Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.
• Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.
• Continuous learning benefits & related support.

This position is generally not eligible for new visasponsorship. At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization.

Render is an equal-opportunity employer. We know that employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, product, and community to flourish. We make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional, and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, marital status, height and/or weight.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

We encourage all who are interested to apply. We can't wait to hear from you!

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