Staff Kubernetes Platform Engineer, Infrastructure (GroqMetal)

Groq • New York, NY

3d

About The Position

Groq is building GroqMetal, an infrastructure platform that turns large-scale physical compute into reliable, isolated, customer-consumable AI infrastructure. This hands-on Senior Staff role will write production software as part of a software engineering team and lead the design of a Kubernetes-based platform for large-scale AI training and inference workloads. The engineer will help turn cutting-edge physical infrastructure into a stable product, delivering production-grade Kubernetes services for dedicated customers.

The role is based in the Dallas, San Francisco, or New York City area. Remote work is available while Groq establishes its local office, with the expectation that the role will transition to onsite once the office opens. Compensation is level-dependent: Staff total cash salary ranges from $270,400 to $365,000, and Senior Staff from $341,400 to $401,600. Placement depends on location, experience, skills, and internal compensation standards. These ranges apply to U.S.-based candidates; international compensation varies by local market. Groq also offers a Long-Term Incentive Program and employee benefits.

The position may require access to export-controlled technology or information. Candidates must meet applicable export-control eligibility criteria. Groq is an Equal Opportunity Employer and provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees.

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 CAP, consensus, leader election, eventual consistency, state reconciliation, fault domains, and recovery.
• Experience developing infrastructure software through a robust SDLC, including design review, automated testing, CI/CD, staged rollout, rollback, observability, and incident learning.

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.
• Experience at a hyperscaler or neocloud 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.

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 and deliver 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 with infrastructure, inference, networking, infosec, and other teams to turn ambiguous platform needs into production systems.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed