Staff Cloud Native Software Engineer

Nscale•San Francisco, CA

1d•$220,000 - $290,000

About The Position

The Staff Cloud Native Software Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for the architecture, coherence, and evolution of a defined domain within Nscale’s cloud-native platform. The role operates across multiple teams, shaping how they build and evolve Kubernetes-native control plane software. It combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership: defining domain direction, making architectural decisions, and creating shared patterns, standards, and guidance while staying close to implementation to validate designs, unblock delivery, and account for operational realities. The engineer owns ambiguous technical problems within the domain, drives alignment across team boundaries, and helps ensure systems built by different teams remain coherent, operable, and maintainable as the platform grows. The role also leads technically critical initiatives, mentors engineers, and works with platform, infrastructure, and SRE stakeholders.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience designing and building Kubernetes-native systems, including controllers, operators, CRDs, and production reconciliation logic.
Strong track record of writing maintainable, testable, and resilient Go for long-lived distributed or control plane systems.
Proven ability to define technical direction across a domain spanning multiple engineers or teams.
Experience driving cross-team architecture and resolving ambiguity in interfaces, ownership, and design.
Deep understanding of Kubernetes control plane patterns, distributed systems failure modes, and operational trade-offs.
Experience creating engineering leverage through standards, reusable components, technical guidance, and architectural clarity.
Strong judgment in balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform health.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to align multiple teams around a coherent technical direction.
Solid grounding in Linux, networking, and infrastructure fundamentals sufficient to debug cross-layer issues.
Experience mentoring engineers and raising technical quality beyond the immediate team.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve the technical direction for a defined cloud-native platform domain, such as control plane orchestration, infrastructure lifecycle, platform APIs, or workload management.
Design and review Kubernetes-native systems spanning multiple components or teams.
Make architectural decisions that balance delivery needs, operational realities, and long-term maintainability.
Resolve ambiguity in architecture, interfaces, and system boundaries for cross-team work.
Act as a technical escalation point for complex issues within the domain.
Drive cross-team design for APIs, controllers, workflows, and operational behavior.
Establish shared patterns and standards for controller and reconciliation design, API and CRD modeling, rollout safety and compatibility, and observability and operational behavior.
Identify and correct technical divergence, overlapping abstractions, and avoidable coupling between systems.
Create leverage through reference implementations, shared libraries, and common tooling where appropriate.
Lead technically critical initiatives spanning 2–4 teams or a defined platform area.
Unblock delivery by clarifying direction, reducing technical ambiguity, and resolving difficult design problems.
Contribute hands-on to validate patterns, de-risk complex implementation work, or accelerate critical delivery.
Ensure domain systems are observable, supportable, and safe to run in production.
Mentor Senior and mid-level engineers in Kubernetes-native design, distributed systems thinking, and production engineering.
Raise engineering quality through code review, design review, and strong technical writing.
Influence technical outcomes across teams without relying on formal authority.
Work with platform, infrastructure, and SRE stakeholders to ensure the domain supports broader platform needs.