Frontend Engineer - Cluster OS Platform

About the Role

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.

What You'll Do

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.

What We're Looking For

Required

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.

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.

Compensation & Benefits

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