Senior Staff Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure
About The Position
Robinhood is building an elite team to apply frontier technologies to the world's biggest financial problems. The Core Infrastructure team is responsible for building and evolving the foundational platform that all Robinhood engineering teams build on. This includes owning the systems, primitives, and developer-facing abstractions that power 24/7 trading, crypto, and global expansion. The team treats infrastructure as a product: reliable, fast to provision, and invisible to the teams above it. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on Core Infrastructure, you will own the architectural evolution of service mesh and connectivity, compute platform, and infrastructure provisioning. Your decisions will directly shape engineering velocity, operational reliability, and Robinhood's ability to expand to new regions and markets. This is a unique opportunity to redesign the foundation before complexity becomes permanent. This role is based in our Menlo Park, California office, with in-person attendance expected at least 3 days per week. Robinhood believes in the power of in-person work to accelerate progress, spark innovation, and strengthen community.
Requirements
- Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes internals — API server, controller reconciliation, etcd watch propagation, scheduler mechanics, and admission control
- Deep working knowledge of Istio and/or Envoy at the source code level — including the xDS API as a protocol; experience debugging at the control-plane/data-plane boundary
- HTTP/2 and gRPC wire-level knowledge — connection management, flow control, stream multiplexing, and observability
- Terraform at architectural scale — module design patterns, provider internals, remote state management, and multi-region provisioning
- Production Go or Python for infrastructure tooling; strong fundamentals in writing well-structured, tested, operationally sound code
- Proven ability to drive cross-functional architectural change across large or complex engineering organizations — influencing without authority and shipping durable decisions
Responsibilities
- Own service mesh architecture end-to-end — standardize and evolve Robinhood's Istio and Envoy deployment, eliminate deprecated communication patterns, and build the networking foundation for multi-region operation
- Drive Kubernetes compute platform evolution — define the long-term direction for cluster lifecycle, scheduling strategy, control plane architecture, and multi-region resiliency across Robinhood's entire compute fleet
- Redesign infrastructure provisioning — transform Terraform from a collection of ad-hoc configurations into a scalable, self-service platform capability that enables rapid region provisioning and developer autonomy
- Operate with source-level depth — diagnose and resolve issues at the Kubernetes API machinery, etcd, Envoy xDS, and Terraform provider layer, and contribute upstream where it serves the platform
- Define technical direction across teams — produce architecture proposals, lead design reviews, and drive cross-functional alignment on infrastructure decisions that affect every engineering organization at Robinhood
Benefits
- Supplemental health insurance
- Ancillary insurance
- Mental health support programs
- Access to the best AI tools on the market and continuous AI skill-building for every employee, technical or not
- Lifestyle wallet — a highly flexible employer-paid benefits spending account for expenses beyond traditional benefits such as wellness, childcare, learning, and more
- Company holidays
- Paid time off
- Sick time
- Paid volunteer time off
- Parental leave
- Catered meals
- Events
- Comfortable workspaces
- Monthly commuter stipend
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
