Frontend Engineer - Cluster OS Platform

Role Summary

A well-funded early-stage Kubernetes infrastructure company is hiring a Frontend Engineer to design and build the interface for their flagship OS-like platform — an experience that makes distributed systems approachable for both individual tinkerers and production engineering teams. You'll help define interaction patterns, visualizations, and real-time UIs that translate complex cluster state into clear, actionable experiences. This is a high-impact, early-team role based on-site in San Francisco.

Responsibilities

• Own the cluster management user interface, including provisioning flows, natural language interfaces, and real-time proactive system insights.
• Design and build visualization systems that make distributed state legible at a glance.
• Surface the right information by integrating with Kubernetes APIs, GitOps controllers, and gRPC/cRPC backends.
• Build real-time reactive UIs using Convex that scale from single users to large teams.
• Prototype new interaction patterns for infrastructure management, test assumptions quickly, and iterate based on feedback.
• Collaborate with backend and platform teams to design elegant protocols for the frontend.
• Establish frontend architecture patterns and best practices as an early engineering team member.
• Write maintainable, well-structured frontend code and champion code quality across the product.

Requirements

• Strong frontend fundamentals with a track record shipping user-facing infrastructure or developer tools.
• End-to-end experience building Next.js applications using React, Tailwind, and shadcn/ui.
• Experience or familiarity with Convex for real-time/reactive UI patterns.
• Production Kubernetes experience — internals, CRDs, operators, cluster architecture, etcd backup/restore, and troubleshooting cluster health.
• Infrastructure as Code proficiency with Terraform and Helm.
• Deep GitOps experience with ArgoCD and declarative infrastructure/continuous deployment patterns.
• Proficiency with observability tooling — Prometheus and Grafana for surfacing cluster health and performance.
• Comfortable working with complex state management that reflects real-world infrastructure.
• 5+ years working in production Kubernetes-based infrastructure.
• Strong Go skills for building system-level tooling, controllers, and distributed systems components.

Nice to Have

• Policy-as-code and security tooling for Kubernetes.
• Background in systems programming or distributed systems.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their managed Kubernetes offerings.
• Track record shipping developer tools or infrastructure products.
• Familiarity with analytics tools such as PostHog.

Salary

Competitive compensation commensurate with experience. Early-team equity opportunity at a venture-backed infrastructure startup.

LOCATION & WORK ARRANGEMENT

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Remote work is not available for this position. Visa sponsorship is not available.