Cloud - Bare Metal Infrastructure Engineer

Render

4d•$230,000 - $290,000

About The Position

Render is seeking a Cloud - Bare Metal Infrastructure Engineer to build and scale its bare metal infrastructure. The engineer will take Render’s first colocation site from an empty cage to production workloads and develop a foundation that can expand to additional sites and thousands of hosts. They will work closely with network engineering and the Kubernetes platform team, with early architectural and operational decisions shaping future sites. The role involves designing and automating the end-to-end server lifecycle, maintaining authoritative fleet records, and building the interfaces and systems that allow platform teams to consume and manage bare metal capacity. The engineer will also help set the technical and operational direction of the platform and contribute to hiring the team that will operate it.

Requirements

Hands-on experience building and operating bare metal fleet automation in datacenters or colocation environments.
Experience working with both physical hardware and colocation providers and software-driven fleet management.
Strong Go or Python skills.
Experience designing systems with reconciliation loops and idempotent, failure-tolerant actions.
Ability to understand and debug underlying tools beyond their abstractions.
Experience operating through real infrastructure failures, such as defective hardware batches, flapping BMCs, or halted rollouts.
Deep Linux knowledge and solid networking fundamentals, including DHCP, PXE, DNS, and BGP.
Working knowledge of Kubernetes sufficient to design the interface between a bare metal fleet and the clusters running on it.
Clear communication, comfort with ambiguity, and willingness to challenge plans when warranted.

Nice To Haves

Experience operating bare metal fleets at a scale of thousands of hosts.
Experience participating in an early-stage bare metal or datacenter build-out.
Experience running hybrid environments or moving workloads between public cloud and owned hardware.
Experience with DCIM/IPAM tools such as NetBox or Nautobot, or provisioning stacks such as Ironic/Metal3, Tinkerbell, or MAAS.
Experience building reconcilers or state machines for physical infrastructure.
Hardware expertise in component diagnostics, burn-in tooling, firmware, or fleet-scale Redfish and IPMI.
Experience building internal platforms or APIs used by other infrastructure teams.
Living near colocation sites or being able to visit them regularly.

Responsibilities

Bring the first colocation site from an empty cage to production workloads and scale the infrastructure to more sites and thousands of hosts.
Design low-touch processes for moving servers from delivery to production, including netboot, imaging, BMC-driven discovery, and host identity.
Partner with network engineering to define fleet networking needs, including out-of-band management and production connectivity.
Build the interface for the Kubernetes platform team to request capacity, view host health, and coordinate maintenance.
Own the source of truth for hardware, software, and the physical environment.
Automate the server lifecycle, including burn-in and acceptance testing, remediation, staged firmware rollouts, and RMA.
Build production-grade automation with safeguards for destructive actions and resilience to site-level failures.
Shape technical and operational direction, including build-versus-buy decisions and operating practices for thousands of hosts.
Help hire the team that will operate the bare metal platform.

Benefits

4 weeks of paid vacation.
14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents, with a supportive return plan.
Long-term disability and life insurance.
401(k) plans.
100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for the employee and a dependent.
Flexible spending accounts (FSAs) and health savings accounts (HSAs).
Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, and related activities.
Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.
Commuter benefits for Bay Area employees.
Home office stipends for remote employees.
Continuous learning benefits and related support.