Staff Engineer, Platform & Control Plane (Kubernetes)

Sycamore; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise, focusing on secure execution substrates for enterprise agents, customer applications, and Sycamore’s control plane. We seek an experienced software/infrastructure engineer to design and operate production-grade control-plane services, tenant isolation, and scalable database platforms.

You will own end-to-end reliability across deployments, assist with customer deployments, and contribute to a high-velocity, on-call

Qualifications

• 5-12 years of software or infrastructure engineering experience.
• Experience building production control-plane software, operators, platform services, or developer infrastructure, not only configuring vendor products.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and delivery systems, including state management, drift detection, reproducible builds, staged rollout, and rollback.
• Evidence of owning consequential production systems through incidents, capacity changes, recovery exercises, and reliability improvements.
• A security-minded approach to tenant isolation, credentials, access control, software supply chains, and customer data.
• The ability to write maintainable production software and automated tests for infrastructure behavior.
• AI-native mindset: using coding agents and models as force multipliers while owning critical operational decisions.
• Clear communication and high EQ when interacting with CTOs, security teams, and engineers.
• Comfort with startup ambiguity and broad ownership, with occasional customer travel.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate Kubernetes-based serving and sandbox platforms for agents, internal services, and customer applications.
• Develop infrastructure-as-code, Helm charts, provisioning services, admission controls, and operators with safe change controls and rollout procedures.
• Own the database fleet: schema topology, migrations, provisioning, rotation, and isolation guarantees.
• Define service level indicators and objectives; manage observability estate as code: monitors, dashboards, tracing, and metric taxonomy.
• Lead incident response from detection to postmortem and structural fixes.
• Support hosted and customer-controlled deployment patterns with consistent operational model.
• Travel to customer sites when collaboration improves deployment or incident outcomes.

Skills

5-12 years

Control-plane software

IaC & delivery

Production ownership

Tenant isolation

Automated tests

AI-native approach

Strong communication

Startup ambiguity

Job description

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise, focusing on secure execution substrates for enterprise agents, customer applications, and Sycamore’s control plane. We seek an experienced software/infrastructure engineer to design and operate production-grade control-plane services, tenant isolation, and scalable database platforms.

You will own end-to-end reliability across deployments, assist with customer deployments, and contribute to a high-velocity, on-call