Platform Engineer

About Loft Labs

We are a venture-backed tech startup striving to be the leading force in enabling platform engineers. After closing our Series A lead by Khosla Ventures in Q1 2024, we are in the hyper-growth phase and looking for motivated people to complement our team. Our headquarters are in San Francisco (Salesforce Tower), but our team is distributed around the globe, and we have a remote-first work culture.

We’re the company behind vCluster, an open-source technology for virtualizing Kubernetes (+40M virtual clusters created by users, vibrant Slack community with +3,000 members, +5k GitHub stars).

The adoption of our commercial product based on vCluster has grown extremely fast (multi-million dollar revenue, 4.6x ARR growth over the past 12 months), and our customer base now includes some of the biggest companies in the world including 6 Global Fortune 500 companies as well as some of the fastest-growing tech unicorns.

Working on developer tools and open-source technology is part of our DNA.
We are the maintainers of several popular open-source projects, including:

• vCluster – Virtual Kubernetes Clusters, a certified Kubernetes distribution with 40M+ downloads: www.vcluster.com
• DevPod – Codespaces but open-source, client-only, unopinionated was #1 on HackerNews twice after launch, +8,000 GitHub stars: www.devpod.sh
• DevSpace – CNCF Sandbox Project, 4,000+ GitHub stars: www.devspace.sh

Our customers include CoreWeave, Shipwire, GoFundMe, and several Fortune 500 companies, including one of the biggest chip manufacturers, one of the Big 4 audit and consulting firms, one of the biggest US financial institutions, and others.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement and secure GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines for cloud-native applications, with a focus on Kubernetes-based deployments
• Maintain and administer internal and customer facing cloud infrastructure
• Build internal developer platforms and tools to improve team velocity and reduce friction
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code for multi-tenant Kubernetes environments
• Create and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions for platform services
• Collaborate with open-source communities and contribute to Loft Labs’ open-source projects
• Implement security best practices and compliance requirements across the platform services
• Share knowledge and collaborate with team members on Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies

Required Skills & Experience

• 5+ years of experience in platform engineering or similar roles
• Strong expertise in Kubernetes administration and architecture
• Proven experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines at scale
• Proficient in at least one programming language (Go preferred)
• Deep understanding of container technologies and orchestration
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, Crossplane)
• Strong knowledge of Git workflows and GitOps practices
• Familiarity with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
• Knowledge of security best practices in Kubernetes environments

What Makes You a Great Fit

• You have hands-on experience with virtual cluster and working with multi-tenant architectures in Kubernetes
• You’re passionate about developer experience and understand the importance of well-designed internal platforms
• You have a track record of contributing to or maintaining open-source projects
• You’re comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment where requirements evolve quickly
• You have excellent troubleshooting skills and can debug complex distributed systems
• You’re self-driven and can manage multiple priorities while maintaining attention to detail
• You have strong written communication skills and can effectively document technical solutions
• You’re excited about working with cutting-edge cloud-native technologies and helping shape their future

Benefits

We offer the following benefits:

• Competitive Salary: We tend to pay higher wages than other startups.
• Platinum-Level Insurance: Health, dental, vision, and life Insurance including plans for you and eligible dependents (benefits vary depending on country)
• Flexible Working Schedule: You have a doctor’s appointment or need to head to the supermarket to get groceries at 2pm? We won’t have an issue with that. To us, results matter more than clocking in and out at the same time every day.
• Workplace Flexibility: If you want to work from home, that’s great! If you’d prefer to work in a coworking space, we can make that happen as well. We’re flexible on all of this and we know things can change in life and we’re happy to adjust the work environment for you along the way.

Why join a startup like Loft Labs?

Since we are a fast-moving startup, you will not be number 14,589 in our company but rather become an essential part of our team right from the start:

• Fast Application Process: We will typically get back to you within a week. No need to polish your resume for us. Just send us some links (e.g. LinkedIn, etc.), answer a few questions about your previous experiences, and hop on a quick Zoom call with one of our team members to see if you’re a good fit. We will respond quickly and make hiring decisions within days rather than months.
• Open-Minded Work Environment: You can always speak your mind – no company politics or unnecessary formalities. We are operating in a lean, honest, and efficient way and we are looking for different perspectives, constructive feedback and creative, motivated people who want to make a difference.
• Grow With The Company: We are a small company right now but we are growing incredibly fast because we work on something that has a lot of value to engineering teams in large enterprises. Joining Loft Labs early will give you the chance to advance much faster to the next step on the career ladder than in any larger company.
• Responsibility From Day 1: You will see right from the start that your work will immediately have an impact in our company and you can shape the future of this company together with the rest of our team. Grow with us and benefit from being part of this journey from the start.

Culture & Values

At Loft Labs, we value and stand for:

• Technical Excellence: We are determined to build best-in-class technology and ship high-quality software because we know that our users are engineers themselves.
• Customer Obsession: We are going above and beyond to make our customers and users happy, which means striving for great usability, excellent documentation and support as well as fast response times for feature requests and bug reports.
• Impressive Speed: From user feedback to shipping a new feature to address this feedback, we usually take less than a week in most cases and our users absolutely love us for this.
• Bold Innovation: We are constantly questioning the state-of-the-art to find and address important issues in our space, even if that means abandoning any existing technologies and starting from scratch again.
• Open Source & Open Mind: We are actively contributing and maintaining open-source projects and we believe that building an open-minded team culture that respects different perspectives and welcomes constructive feedback is equally paramount to our success.

Loft Labs, Inc. provides equal opportunities for all candidates. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive work environment for everyone who becomes part of our team. We are also actively promoting measures to reduce bias throughout our hiring process to ensure that everyone gets the same opportunities.