Software Engineer - Infrastructure

Emergent Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 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

A leading AI-driven software company in San Francisco is seeking a Platform Engineer skilled in maintaining distributed systems and Kubernetes. Candidates should have 4+ years of experience, proficiency in Go or Python, and a strong foundation in networking and Linux systems. You will manage application deployments, monitor observability stacks, and enhance internal tools for team productivity. This is a fast-paced, innovative environment that offers significant ownership and impact from day one.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software/platform engineering experience with production systems.
• Strong proficiency in Go or Python, writing production code daily.
• Experience building and deploying services on Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with GitOps tooling like ArgoCD, Flux, or similar.
• Strong networking fundamentals including TCP/IP and DNS.
• Solid Linux/OS fundamentals with debugging capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Maintain platform stability of distributed microservices and Kubernetes.
• Own the observability stack using Grafana and New Relic.
• Support AI agent workloads, including scheduling and monitoring.
• Work closely with product and backend teams for platform scalability.
• Automate workflows and improve internal productivity.

Skills

Go

Python

Kubernetes

GitOps

Networking fundamentals

Linux/OS fundamentals

SQL

Job description

Emergent builds autonomous coding agents that replace traditional software development by generating, testing, and deploying production applications directly from plain-language intent. Our systems run in production at global scale and are used to build millions of real applications.

Since public launch, Emergent has reached $100M ARR in 8 months. 6M+ users across 190+ countries have built 6.5M+ applications on Emergent. We've raised $100M+, backed by Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed, Prosus, Together, and Y Combinator.

We're solving the hard part of AI-driven software creation: correctness, reliability, security, and scale in real production systems. The team is built by repeat founders, Olympiad medalists, IIT & IIM alumni, and leaders from Google, Amazon, and Dropbox.

We're hiring builders who want ownership, speed, and impact at global scale.

What You'll Be Responsible For

Platform & 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 & Incident Response

• Own the observability stack: Grafana (dashboards, Loki logs, Prometheus metrics), 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 — job scheduling, trajectory tracking, environment provisioning, deployments and cost attribution
• Develop Kubernetes controllers and operators to extend platform capabilities for agent orchestration

Collaboration & 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

• 4+ 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)
• 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 & 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 & streaming— hands‑on with Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, or similar for event‑driven architectures
• Strong SQL skills for debugging and operational queries

Infrastructure & 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)

Nice to Have

• Experience building Kubernetes Operators (kubebuilder, operator-sdk, or controller-runtime)
• 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

What You're Like

• You’re 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

We don't require previous experience with our entire stack, but enthusiasm for learning is key.

Why Emergent Labs

• YC S24 backed with strong investor support
• Building at the frontier of AI-powered software creation
• Small team, high ownership, real impact from day one

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

Let's build the future of software together.