Senior Backend Engineer, Managed Kubernetes & Slurm

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operate backend services in Go or Python that power Lightning AI's managed infrastructure platform.
• Develop control plane services that provision, orchestrate, and manage Kubernetes and Slurm clusters across large-scale GPU infrastructure.
• Build distributed systems that automate cluster lifecycle management, workload scheduling, infrastructure provisioning, and platform operations.
• Develop platform capabilities using Kubernetes APIs, controllers, operators, and other cloud-native technologies.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, security, and observability of our managed platform through automation and operational excellence.
• Diagnose and resolve complex production issues across Kubernetes, distributed systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, AI, and platform engineering teams to shape the future of our cloud platform.
• Contribute to technical design, architecture, mentoring, engineering best practices, and on-call operations.

What You’ll Need

Required Qualifications

• Significant professional experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems using Go or Python.
• Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes or Slurm, including operating large-scale production environments.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and production infrastructure.
• Experience designing and building scalable backend services, APIs, and automation for infrastructure or platform operations.
• Strong understanding of networking, storage, and cloud infrastructure fundamentals.
• Familiarity with observability, CI/CD, testing, production operations, and incident response.
• Ability to own complex technical projects while collaborating effectively across engineering teams.

Ideal Experience

• Kubernetes platform development, including operators, controllers, CRDs, or control plane components
• Slurm administration, scheduling, or HPC environments
• Infrastructure-as-Code or GitOps tooling such as Terraform, Crossplane, Helm, Argo CD, Flux, or Kustomize
• GPU infrastructure, AI platforms, or large-scale compute environments
• Kubernetes networking, storage, or multi-tenant platform architecture
• Event-driven systems, gRPC, or distributed messaging
• Building CI/CD systems for production environments
• Contributions to cloud-native or open source infrastructure projects

Compensation

The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is: $180,000–$250,000 USD

In addition to base salary, our total rewards package for eligible roles includes a discretionary bonus, a meaningful equity component, and comprehensive benefits.