Container Engineer

Description

The company is the company, a Postgres development platform with a complete backend: database, auth, storage, edge functions, realtime and vector search. Over 9 million developers and more than 250,000 customers build on it, and most new databases on the platform come from AI app builders, so the infrastructure has to stay reliable as usage grows quickly.

The Container Engineering team runs the internal container platform behind the company's multi-tenant, multi-region services, a managed Kubernetes platform that other engineering teams deploy onto. The team handles cluster lifecycle and classes, multi-cluster and multi-region topology, capacity, scheduling, isolation and runtime safety, higher-level platform APIs, the Kubernetes deployment contract and Argo semantics, rollout primitives, and runtime configuration with secret injection.

The goal is a platform that is trustworthy, observable and inexpensive to run at scale, and a higher reliability bar for every team that uses it. This is not a gatekeeping role. You will make the safe option the default by building automation and platform APIs, instrumenting what the team runs, and making sure failures are detected and recovered from quickly.

The role draws on three areas: tooling and ecosystem (Kubernetes, containerd/OCI, the CNCF landscape and how to combine these pieces), software engineering (building automation, controllers and internal tools as production code, including solutions no existing tool provides), and operations/SRE (SLOs, error budgets, incident response and ORRs). You need to be deep in at least one area, and many strong candidates are deep in two. Few people are strong in all three, so you will focus where the need is greatest. Tell us which area is your main strength.

The company has about 400 team members in more than 60 countries, speaking over 20 languages. It was born remote and is open-source first, and has raised over $1B, including a $500M Series F. The community has 540,000+ members. The team moves fast, builds in public and uses what it ships.

Responsibilities

• Share the team's on-call rota with everyone, regardless of skill set, responding to platform incidents and driving them to resolution and follow-up.
• Define SLIs, SLOs and error budgets for the container platform, and write error-budget policies that gate platform changes.
• Own the Operational Readiness Review process for new platform capabilities and major changes.
• Track platform uptime metrics, and improve observability by capturing the right metrics, logs and traces across each platform layer.
• Run blameless postmortems, link findings to readiness gaps, find repeat failure patterns, and drive systemic fixes through.
• Build and maintain the platform's automation, controllers, operators and internal tooling, and ship it as production code rather than only connecting existing tools.
• Design and implement platform CI/CD and rollout primitives that speed up deployments within change and release management rules.
• Implement and maintain platform security automation: intrusion detection, automated remediation and patch management.
• Find and measure operational toil, and automate it away instead of documenting it.
• Contribute to the continual testing automation that checks platform releases before they reach tenants.
• Contribute to failure-mode analysis, dependency mapping and resilience design for multi-tenant container workloads.
• Evaluate and evolve the orchestration, runtime, networking, isolation and observability tooling, with a clear view on trade-offs.
• Redesign system architecture to cut infrastructure cost while balancing security, reliability and performance across tenants.
• Advise teams building on the platform on sustainable on-call practices: alert quality, escalation paths, runbook coverage and noise reduction.

Requirements

• 5+ years in platform engineering, container or Kubernetes platform operations, SRE or production infrastructure, including operating production systems at scale and carrying on-call for them.
• Deep knowledge of at least one of the three areas, ideally two. Tooling and ecosystem: Kubernetes, containerd, OCI/CRI standards and CNCF tools such as Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, Cilium, Gateway API, Karpenter, KEDA, gVisor or Kata Containers, with a considered view on trade-offs. Software engineering: production Go or a comparable systems language, and building controllers, operators and platform APIs when no off-the-shelf tool fits. Operations: fluent in SLOs, error budgets and operational KPIs, with experience leading incident response and blameless postmortems and reducing MTTD and MTTR.
• Experience with large-scale multi-tenant systems and isolation, from namespaces, RBAC, network policies and resource quotas up to stronger primitives such as virtual clusters (e.g. vCluster) or VM-class runtimes.
• Confident operating on AWS across multiple accounts, IAM and VPC, and comfortable with infrastructure as code (Pulumi preferred; Terraform or CDK also accepted) and Kubernetes.
• Scripting and automation skills used to remove toil rather than live with it.
• Clear communication with infrastructure specialists and product engineers, and effective work in asynchronous, globally distributed teams.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and with improving systems iteratively over time.
• Experience building and operating a multi-tenant Kubernetes platform that internal teams deploy onto.
• Familiarity with policy engines (Kyverno, or OPA/Gatekeeper) and cost attribution tools (OpenCost, Kubecost) for per-tenant chargeback or showback.
• Experience with managed database platforms or Postgres.
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana or similar observability tools.

Conditions

Fully remote, hiring globally, with no office to attend.

Work is asynchronous and you manage your own time.

Equal opportunity employer.

Benefits

• A WeWork membership or co-working allowance usable anywhere in the world.
• Equity: every team member receives ESOP in the company.
• A tech allowance for setting up your work environment, such as a laptop, monitor or headphones.
• Health insurance: the company covers 100% of employee health insurance and 80% for dependents, wherever you live.
• An annual company off-site in a new city, lasting a week.
• An annual education allowance for courses, books, conferences or other learning.