Principal Software Engineer - Fleet Management

Nscale•Seattle, WA

1d•$240,000 - $400,000

About The Position

Nscale is building a vertically integrated GenAI cloud from sustainable data centers to advanced AI infrastructure and enterprise applications. Our culture values open collaboration, ownership, and excellence. We're hiring a Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical development of our Fleet Manager platform - the workflow automation system that provisions, tests, and remediates GPU nodes and network switches at scale. As technical lead, you'll own the architecture and delivery of foundational Python-based automation systems that manage the entire lifecycle of our compute infrastructure: device enrolment, burn-in testing, network configuration, GPU health monitoring, and self-healing capabilities. You'll mentor a team of senior engineers, set technical direction, and drive engineering excellence while remaining hands-on with critical systems.

Requirements

12-15+ years software engineering experience building and operating production systems, with proven technical leadership in infrastructure automation or workflow tooling
Strong Python engineering fundamentals with experience leading complex, multi-service distributed systems
Driven by building distributed systems at scale, infrastructure reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement
Technical expertise: quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs, keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems
Track record of owning technical roadmaps and delivering large-scale automation systems from ambiguous requirements to production
Use AI tools like Claude or Cursor as a core part of your development workflow - as a fundamental multiplier of what you can build
Deep understanding of operational excellence: SLOs, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and production reliability
Strong mentorship skills with ability to develop high-performing engineering teams
Excellent communication skills to build consensus with stakeholders, both internally and externally

Nice To Haves

Experience with workflow orchestration tools like Temporal, Airflow, Prefect, or similar
Hands-on experience with infrastructure tooling: DCIMs, NetBox, OpenStack, or ERP systems
Bare metal provisioning and automation: MAAS, Ironic, IPMI, PXE boot, or network automation
Experience building hardware lifecycle automation: provisioning, validation, testing, or remediation workflows
GPU infrastructure experience: health monitoring, burn-in testing, or cluster management
HPC and networking: datacenter topology, high-performance interconnects (InfiniBand, RoCE)
Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi), AWS, and GCP
Track record of 1+ years leading large-scale, complex projects or technical teams
Open-source contributions in infrastructure automation or cloud-native tooling

Responsibilities

Lead technical architecture and roadmap for Fleet Manager's workflow automation systems
Own end-to-end delivery of device provisioning, validation, testing, and remediation workflows at scale
Design and build workflow orchestration systems for GPU node and network switch lifecycle management
Establish engineering standards for reliability, observability, and operational excellence across all Fleet Manager services
Mentor and raise the bar for a team of senior engineers through design reviews, technical leadership, and hands-on collaboration
Drive architecture decisions balancing automation complexity, reliability, and maintainability
Integrate with infrastructure tooling: DCIMs, NetBox, OpenStack, bare metal APIs (MAAS, Ironic, IPMI)
Partner with Infrastructure, Platform, and SRE teams to translate operational needs into robust, scalable automation
Build production-grade Python systems for hardware lifecycle automation, leveraging AI tools to accelerate delivery