Team Lead, Platform Engineering (2x Openings)

Volta; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Retirement plan

Vacation days

Competitive salary

Job summary

Volta is seeking a hands-on Platform Engineering Lead to steer a team responsible for compute, storage, control plane, and APIs across Kubernetes-native infrastructure. You will own technical direction, ensure reliability, and deliver scalable platform features while remaining close to code.

You will manage 1:1s, performance reviews, and hiring, while partnering with security and other teams to align with product goals. This leadership role requires strong communication and a hands-on mindset.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in cloud platform or infrastructure engineering, with at least 2 years leading an engineering team.
• Strong backend or systems programming background; our languages include Python, Go, and Rust (others ok).
• Kubernetes in depth: cluster operations, networking, scheduling, workload management in production.
• Experience with GPU infrastructure provisioning and resource management is a plus.
• Excellent communication to translate technical concepts for product and leadership stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead a platform engineering team: direction, design reviews, code reviews, delivery.
• Set technical direction for stack areas and translate requirements into work.
• Represent platform engineering in roadmap planning and prioritization.
• Collaborate with bring-up teams to surface operational pain and build scalable features.
• Work with security to integrate guidance and remediate findings.
• Coordinate with other platform leads on architecture and cross-team delivery.
• Own reliability, observability, security, and API-versioning standards.
• Stay hands-on with high-risk engineering tasks alongside the team.
• Run post-mortems and close structural gaps after incidents.

Skills

Cloud platform

Distributed systems

Leadership

Stakeholder comms

Security awareness

Tools

Kubernetes

Python

Go

Rust

C++

Job description

About Volta

Volta is the category-defining, fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform – from capital to clusters to software, under a founder-led enterprise. Our mission is The Utility of Compute™: AI infrastructure as dependable and available as electricity, for every organization that needs it. Launched with a $10B strategic partnership with one of the leading frontier AI labs, a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and a $5B AI Infrastructure Fund, Volta is building the infrastructure layer of the AI era from the ground up. We are 100+ people across London, Palo Alto, and New York, with rapid growth expectations to hundreds.

About The Role

Volta builds and operates large scale GPU compute infrastructure for AI workloads. Our platform is Kubernetes-native, spans multiple regions, and delivers virtual machines, storage, and networking through a fully automated infrastructure stack.

Platform Engineering is organized as capability teams, each owning a defined part of the stack: compute, storage, the control plane and API layer, confidential computing, networking, and the customer-facing surface. You will lead one of them.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You set technical direction for your team's area, carry accountability for what it delivers, and manage the people doing the work. You are expected to stay close enough to the code to take on the hard problems yourself.

What You Will Be Doing

• Lead a platform engineering team: technical direction, design reviews, code review, and day-to-day delivery.




• Set the technical direction for your team's area of the stack, and design and build the platform layers it owns as product requirements take shape.




• Represent platform engineering in roadmap planning: translate product requirements into scoped, sequenced technical work, communicate trade-offs, and keep delivery on track.




• Work closely with the bring-up teams to surface operational pain points and turn them into scalable platform features.




• Collaborate with the security engineering team to integrate security guidance at the platform layer and ensure findings are remediated effectively.




• Coordinate with the other platform engineering leads on shared architecture, joint initiatives, and cross-team and cross-timezone delivery.




• Own reliability, observability, security, and interface and versioning standards for the services your team ships.




• Stay hands-on: take on complex or high-risk engineering work directly alongside the team.




• Run post-mortems and close structural gaps after incidents, not just the immediate issue.




• Manage the team: 1:1s, performance conversations, hiring interviews, and onboarding.

What You Bring

• 5+ years in cloud platform or infrastructure engineering, with at least 2 years leading an engineering team.




• Strong backend or systems programming background in a production environment. Our working languages are Python, Go, and Rust; we welcome strong engineers from other compiled or object-oriented languages (for example C++, C#, or Java) who are ready to work across our stack as it evolves.




• Kubernetes at depth: cluster operations, CNI networking, scheduling, and workload management in production.




• GPU infrastructure experience: provisioning, resource allocation, and surfacing capacity through a platform or API layer.




• Solid networking fundamentals: L2/L3, VLANs, overlay networks, and multi-tenant isolation in cloud environments.




• Service architecture skills: designing, operating, and versioning production-grade control-plane services and APIs across IaaS and above, holding the team to clean, industry-standard interface and breaking-change practices.




• Security awareness: trust boundaries, least privilege, and secure defaults when building platform services.




• Proven people management: running 1:1s, delivering performance feedback, and taking accountability for a team's delivery and wellbeing.




• Clear communicator who can translate technical complexity for product and leadership stakeholders.

Nice to Have (But Not Essential)

None of these are required. Several map to specific teams, so strength in one or more helps us match you to the right one:

• Fluency with AI-assisted development, and interest in scaling agent-assisted workflows across the team (agentic CLI tools, MCP, skills, APIs) to amplify delivery.




• Familiarity with confidential computing technologies: TEEs, AMD SEV, Intel TDX, or Confidential Containers (CoCo).




• Experience building SaaS or PaaS layers on top of an IaaS platform.




• Familiarity with RDMA, InfiniBand, or RoCE networking in GPU or HPC clusters.




• Experience working distributed across time zones with counterparts in other regions.




• Exposure to serverless or inference serving infrastructure.

What We Offer

At Volta, we believe people do their best work when they feel supported, trusted and able to grow. We're building a company where you can make an impact, keep a healthy balance between work and life, and build a career you're proud of.
As a global team, we do our best to provide great benefits wherever you're based. While some benefits vary by country due to local regulations, we believe looking after our people is simply the right thing to do.

• Competitive salary based on the work you do here, not your previous salary




• Equity in Volta, giving you the opportunity to share in the company's long-term success




• Retirement/pension contributions




• Comprehensive health, wellbeing and insurance benefits




• Generous number of vacation days each year

Additional Information

Equal Opportunity

Volta is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and make employment decisions based on skills, qualifications, experience and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic.

Accessibility

Volta is committed to providing an accessible recruitment experience for all candidates. If you require accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the application or interview process, please contact us at [e-mail]. We will work with you to identify reasonable accommodations that enable you to participate fully in the hiring process.

Candidate Privacy Notice

By applying, you consent to the processing of your personal data for recruitment purposes in accordance with applicable data protection laws, including the UK GDPR, EU GDPR and relevant US state privacy regulations. Your data will be shared only with those involved in the hiring process and will not be used for unrelated purposes. For details, see our Recruitment & Candidate Privacy Notice.

Note to Recruitment Agencies

Volta does not accept unsolicited CVs or candidate profiles from recruitment agencies. Any unsolicited submissions, including those sent directly to hiring managers or employees, will be treated as the property of Volta. No agency fees will be payable unless a valid, signed recruitment agreement is in place, and the agency has been specifically engaged for the relevant vacancy.