Senior Staff Cloud Native Software Engineer

Nscale•San Francisco, NY

17h

About The Position

The Senior Staff Cloud Native Software Engineer is a pillar-level technical leader responsible for the long-term coherence, roadmap, and architectural quality of a broad area of Nscale’s cloud-native platform. The role spans multiple related teams and domains, ensuring platform capabilities evolve consistently, scale effectively, and support strategic goals. It combines hands-on technical depth with broad architectural leadership. The engineer defines multi-year direction across a platform pillar, leads major cross-team initiatives, and establishes standards and engineering practices adopted broadly. They work through influence rather than formal authority, aligning teams around shared direction while staying grounded in implementation and operations. The role addresses ambiguous, high-leverage problems across systems and teams, identifies systemic technical risks, reduces fragmentation, and strengthens the platform’s architectural foundation. The position may be eligible for bonus, equity, and/or commission programs. Nscale may offer medical, dental, and vision coverage, flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience designing and evolving large-scale Kubernetes-native platform systems across multiple teams or domains.
Proven ability to define and lead architecture across a broad platform area with significant ambiguity and long time horizons.
Strong track record of creating leverage through standards, roadmaps, shared abstractions, and cross-team technical leadership.
Deep expertise in distributed systems, Kubernetes internals, control plane architecture, and production operational design.
Experience leading major technical initiatives spanning multiple teams and requiring sustained influence without formal authority.
Strong judgement in balancing immediate delivery, platform consistency, operational realities, and long-term maintainability.
Demonstrated ability to identify systemic technical risks and address them through architecture, standards, and technical alignment.
Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to drive adoption of technical direction across a broad engineering area.
Strong mentoring track record, particularly helping senior engineers grow into Staff-level technical leaders.
Strong grounding in Linux, networking, and infrastructure fundamentals, with sufficient depth to reason through complex cross-layer behaviour.

Nice To Haves

Working knowledge of GPU-backed platforms or AI workload constraints.

Responsibilities

Define and evolve the technical roadmap for a broad platform pillar spanning multiple related teams or domains.
Lead major architectural initiatives affecting multiple subsystems, services, or platform capabilities.
Ensure architectural decisions across teams contribute to a coherent long-term platform direction.
Identify systemic weaknesses, duplication, and architectural drift, and drive corrective action.
Translate strategic product, infrastructure, and platform goals into clear technical direction for multiple teams.
Define and maintain pillar-wide standards for controller and operator design; API and CRD design; compatibility, versioning, and deprecation; and observability, rollout, and operational behaviour.
Ensure consistency across teams in Kubernetes usage, reconciliation semantics, service boundaries, and failure handling.
Create shared abstractions, reference implementations, and engineering guardrails that improve consistency without unnecessary bureaucracy.
Review designs across the pillar to prevent divergence, local optimisation, and accidental coupling between teams.
Drive ambiguous, high-impact technical work that does not fit within a single team’s ownership.
Unblock multiple teams by resolving difficult technical trade-offs and clarifying architectural direction.
Act as a senior technical advisor to engineering leadership for the platform pillar.
Maintain hands-on engagement to validate major design choices, guide implementation, and retain technical credibility.
Improve team effectiveness through technical writing, design reviews, and decision-making frameworks.
Mentor Staff and Senior engineers and help grow technical leadership capability across the pillar.
Raise the technical bar through architecture reviews, coaching, and knowledge sharing.
Model strong judgement, influence, and clarity in shaping technical leadership across multiple teams.
Partner with managers and senior leaders to identify capability gaps and strengthen the organisation’s ability to execute complex technical work.