Member of Technical Staff, Principal AI Infrastructure Engineer

Edison Scientific•San Francisco, CA

17h

About The Position

Edison Scientific builds and deploys AI scientist agents to accelerate science and the development of new medicines. The Principal Member of Technical Staff will design, scale, and operate the core platform infrastructure that powers autonomous scientific discovery, with a primary focus on orchestrating agents at scale. The role involves building and managing clusters that orchestrate thousands of persistent, stateful workloads, developing custom resource definitions (CRDs) and operators, and ensuring the reliability and efficiency of the compute layer. The role will own the infrastructure foundation for AI agents performing long-running scientific research, including resilient scheduling, lifecycle management, and resource orchestration. It will influence platform architecture, establish infrastructure best practices, and partner with backend engineers, ML engineers, and researchers to deliver a production-grade environment. This position is part of the Platform Infrastructure team.

Requirements

10+ years of professional infrastructure or platform engineering experience, with deep hands-on Kubernetes expertise in production environments.
Experience designing and implementing CRDs and Kubernetes operators using frameworks such as Kubebuilder, Operator SDK, or controller-runtime.
Track record of operating and scaling Kubernetes clusters that support thousands of persistent or long-lived resources.
Deep understanding of Kubernetes internals, including the API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager, and kubelet, and how they behave at scale.
Expertise with cloud infrastructure such as AWS EKS, GCP GKE, or Azure AKS and associated networking, storage, and IAM primitives.
Proficiency in at least one systems or backend language for operator development and infrastructure tooling.
Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or Crossplane, and GitOps workflows.
Strong working knowledge of container networking, storage, and security, including CNI plugins, service mesh, network policies, CSI, persistent volumes, StatefulSets, RBAC, Pod Security Standards, and secrets management.
Ability to operate autonomously, make sound technical judgments, and drive projects from concept through production.

Nice To Haves

Experience with data-intensive platforms, scientific computing, or ML/AI infrastructure.
Prior experience in startups or small teams with significant architectural ownership and ambiguity.
Experience scaling systems, teams, or platforms through periods of rapid growth.

Responsibilities

Architect, implement, and operate Kubernetes clusters supporting thousands of concurrent, persistent resources with high availability and efficient resource utilization.
Design and develop custom resource definitions (CRDs) and Kubernetes operators for domain-specific workloads such as AI agent lifecycles, research pipelines, and long-running compute tasks.
Drive strategy for cluster scaling, node pool management, autoscaling policies, and resource quota frameworks.
Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code for reproducible, version-controlled environment management.
Design and implement scheduling, placement, and affinity strategies for cost, performance, and fault tolerance across heterogeneous workloads.
Establish and uphold best practices for infrastructure observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
Own Kubernetes storage and networking strategy, including persistent volume management, CSI drivers, service mesh, network policies, and ingress architecture.
Troubleshoot complex, cross-system infrastructure issues and guide others through debugging and remediation in distributed environments.
Collaborate with backend, ML, and research teams to understand workload requirements and translate them into reliable infrastructure patterns.

Benefits

Competitive salary and equity.
Full healthcare coverage, with 100% of premiums paid for employees and their dependents.
Yearly new parent stipend and fertility coverage through Carrot.
Mental health support through Rula.
12 weeks of paid parental leave for maternity, paternity, and adoption.
Yearly employer-funded pet care stipend.
Commuter benefits for transit and parking.
401(k) company matching.
$300 quarterly health and wellness benefit.
Lunch provided every day employees are in the office, and dinner when working late.
Regular team off-sites and company events.