Software Engineer - Infrastructure

Emergentlabsinc; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k)

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited Paid Time Off

Flexible Working Hours

Job summary

Emergentlabsinc in San Francisco is looking for a skilled Platform Engineer to enhance their infrastructure stability and automation. You will manage Kubernetes workloads, maintain observability stacks, and collaborate with product teams to ensure scalability.

The ideal candidate has over 3 years of software engineering experience, strong proficiency in Go or Python, and a passion for automation in cloud environments. Join us for a flexible work culture with substantial growth opportunities!

Qualifications

• 3+ years of software/platform engineering experience with production systems.
• Strong proficiency in Go or Python, writing production code daily.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying services on Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Maintain stability of the platform composed of distributed microservices.
• Manage Kubernetes workloads and automate infrastructure operations.
• Own the observability stack and enhance monitoring across services.

Skills

Software/platform engineering experience

Proficiency in Go or Python

Experience with Kubernetes

GitOps tooling experience

Networking fundamentals

Relational and NoSQL databases

Observability stack tools

Tools

Kubernetes

Grafana

AWS

GCP

Job description

What You’ll Do:

Platform and Infrastructure

• Maintain stability of our platform consisting of distributed microservices closely interacting with Kubernetes and cloud providers (GCP, AWS)
• Manage Kubernetes workloads with ArgoCD (GitOps), deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot application syncs, resource trees, and rollouts
• Debug and resolve complex Kubernetes issues across clusters
• Manage CDN and edge infrastructure (Cloudflare) for performance, caching, and traffic management
• Automate infrastructure lifecycle operations and workflows

Observability and Incident Response

• Own the observability stack: Grafana (dashboards, Loki logs, Prometheus metrics) and New Relic (APM, golden metrics, transaction analysis)
• Enhance monitoring, alerting, and distributed tracing across services
• Participate in on-call rotation via PagerDuty, handle incident response, and perform root cause analysis
• Proactively identify reliability risks before they become incidents

AI Agent Infrastructure

• Support the platform that runs AI agent workloads including job scheduling, trajectory tracking, environment provisioning, deployments, and cost attribution
• Develop Kubernetes controllers and operators to extend platform capabilities for agent orchestration

Collaboration and Internal Tooling

• Work closely with product and backend teams to ensure platform scalability and reliability
• Build internal tools, automate workflows, and integrate systems to improve team productivity
• Stay current with Kubernetes releases, CNCF ecosystem updates, and cloud-native best practices

What We're Looking For:

Core Requirements

• 3+ years of software/platform engineering experience with production systems
• Strong proficiency in Go or Python, you write production code in at least one daily
• Hands‑on experience building and deploying services on Kubernetes, not just YAML, you've developed something that runs on K8s
• Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux, or similar)

Systems Fundamentals

• Strong networking and DNS fundamentals: TCP/IP, HTTP, load balancing, DNS resolution, TLS, and debugging connectivity issues
• Solid Linux/OS fundamentals: process management, filesystem, memory, systemd, and comfortable debugging with tools like strace, tcpdump, and netstat

Data and Messaging Infrastructure

• Relational databases: experience with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or similar; indexing, query optimization, replication, and backup/restore procedures
• NoSQL databases: familiarity with MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis, or similar for document/key‑value workloads
• Caching: experience with Redis, Memcached, or similar for application and infrastructure‑level caching
• Message queues and streaming: hands‑on with Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, or similar for event-driven architectures
• Strong SQL skills for debugging and operational queries

Infrastructure and Observability

• Comfortable with the CNCF ecosystem: Helm, Kustomize, cert‑manager, Ingress controllers, CNI/CSI interfaces
• Hands‑on with at least one observability stack (Grafana/Prometheus/Loki, New Relic, Datadog, or similar)
• Familiarity with GCP and/or AWS: managed Kubernetes (GKE/EKS), networking, IAM, storage, and cloud‑native services (SES, SQS, S3, etc.)
• Experience with CDN/edge platforms (Cloudflare, CloudFront, or similar)

Good to Have:

• Experience building Kubernetes Operators (kubebuilder, operator‑sdk, or controller‑runtime)
• Experience tuning Kubernetes core components (API server, kubelet, scheduler)
• Familiarity with AI/LLM infrastructure: token management, cost tracking, agent orchestration
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, automated testing, deployment pipelines)
• Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar)
• Previous work on large‑scale distributed systems or platform‑as‑a‑service
• Startup experience, you thrive in fast‑paced, ambiguous environments

Who You Are:

• A generalist who can context‑switch between debugging a K8s deployment, setting up a Grafana alert, and configuring CDN rules, all in the same day
• You enjoy solving complex infrastructure challenges and automating away toil
• You dig deep, when something breaks, you find the root cause, not just the workaround
• You communicate clearly and can collaborate effectively in a fast‑moving, distributed team

Tech Stack:

We don't require previous experience with our entire stack, but enthusiasm for learning is key: Go, Python, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Helm, GCP, AWS, Cloudflare, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, New Relic, PagerDuty, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, and GitHub.

Benefits and Perks:

• 401(k)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited Paid Time Off: take the time you need to recharge and come back refreshed
• Flexible Working Hours: work arrangements that fit your life and commitments