Staff Kubernetes Platform Engineer, Infrastructure (GroqMetal)

Groq•New York, NY

4d•$270,400 - $401,600•Hybrid

About The Position

GroqMetal is building an infrastructure platform that turns large-scale physical compute into reliable, isolated, customer-consumable AI infrastructure. This is a hands-on Senior Staff role on a software engineering team, focused on designing and building a Kubernetes-based platform for large-scale AI training and inference workloads. The role combines substantial production software development with technical leadership to transform physical infrastructure into a stable product. The position is based in the Dallas, San Francisco, or New York City area. Employees may work remotely while a local Groq office is established, with the expectation that the role will transition to onsite work once the office opens. The role works across infrastructure, inference, networking, information security, and other teams to turn ambiguous platform needs into production systems. Total cash compensation, inclusive of potential bonus value, is $270,400–$365,000 for Staff and $341,400–$401,600 for Senior Staff, depending on level and individual factors. Groq also offers a Long-Term Incentive (LTI) Program and employee benefits.

Requirements

Strong experience designing, implementing, testing, shipping, and maintaining production software.
Deep Kubernetes platform engineering experience, including operators/controllers, CRDs, admission control, node lifecycle, cluster services, and production-grade platform design.
Practical distributed-systems expertise, including reasoning about CAP, consensus, leader election, eventual consistency, state reconciliation, fault domains, and recovery.
Experience developing infrastructure software through a robust software development lifecycle, including design review, automated testing, CI/CD, staged rollout, rollback, observability, and incident learning.
Experience in hyperscaler or neocloud environments supporting AI workloads or commercializing GPU clusters, with a strong understanding of operational and product challenges in large-scale accelerator infrastructure.
Experience with inference platforms, accelerator/GPU infrastructure, device plugins, cloud infrastructure, or customer-facing platform products.
Must be based in the Dallas, San Francisco, or New York City area.

Nice To Haves

Practical experience delivering Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, or infrastructure control planes as a commercially critical or externally consumed product.
Substantive hands-on experience using coding agents such as Codex, Claude Code, or similar systems or harnesses.

Responsibilities

Design and build core Groq platform systems, including APIs, controllers, operators, reconciliation loops, and infrastructure abstractions.
Write, review, test, debug, and operate substantial production code while providing Senior Staff technical leadership.
Use Kubernetes to build a commercial AI infrastructure product, delivering production-grade Kubernetes services for dedicated customers running large-scale AI training and inference workloads.
Apply distributed-systems principles to partial failure, retries, concurrency, consistency, idempotency, availability, and recovery.
Design stable platform APIs and contracts that decouple the customer experience from changes in backend infrastructure.
Collaborate across infrastructure, inference, networking, information security, and other teams to turn ambiguous platform needs into production systems.