Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Kubernetes Infrastructure

fal is the generative media ecosystem powering the next generation of AI products. We build the infrastructure, tools, and model access that teams need to move from idea to production, and do it at scale without compromise. For developers and enterprises, fal is the foundation that makes generative media not just possible, but practical: a unified platform where high-performance inference, orchestration, and observability come together to unlock new categories of AI-native products.

As generative media reshapes industries across a market projected to grow by hundreds of billions over the next decade, fal is becoming the ecosystem that ambitious teams build on.

About this role:

You will build the high-performance compute environments we deliver to customers. These environments span bare-metal servers, virtual machines with GPU passthrough, Kubernetes and Slurm clusters, distributed storage, and high-speed networking.

You will work across the infrastructure stack — from Linux images and hardware provisioning to cluster networking, GPU performance, observability, and lifecycle automation. The goal is to make every customer environment performant, reliable, isolated, and repeatable.

What you'll do:

Design, automate, validate, and deliver the complete lifecycle of customer compute environments — from provisioning through upgrades, recovery, and decommissioning

Use AI aggressively to automate and accelerate every aspect of infrastructure delivery and operations

Provision dedicated Kubernetes and Slurm clusters tailored to customer workloads

Build and maintain Linux images and automated OS-provisioning workflows

Operate the NVIDIA GPU stack: drivers, GPU Operator, NVIDIA Container Toolkit, device plugins, MIG, and GPU monitoring

Design Kubernetes and data-center networking using Cilium/Calico, MetalLB, VLAN, VXLAN, BGP, and ECMP

Configure distributed and shared storage for high-performance workloads

Build monitoring, alerting, diagnostics, and automated recovery for customer environments

Develop reusable tooling, standards, documentation, and runbooks

Collaborate with customers and internal teams to translate workload requirements into sound infrastructure designs

Qualifications/Nice to Have:

5+ years of experience building and operating production Linux infrastructure

Strong production experience with Kubernetes on bare metal (bootstrapping, upgrades, HA control planes, etcd, containerd, CNI, CSI, ingress, load-balancing, observability, security, troubleshooting)

Experience with Linux virtualization: KVM/QEMU, libvirt, VFIO device passthrough

Experience operating NVIDIA GPUs on Linux and Kubernetes (drivers, container runtimes, device plugins, GPU Operator, GPU telemetry)

Strong networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, L2/L3, VLANs, routing, packet-level troubleshooting (tcpdump, Wireshark)

Practical scripting experience

Experience with configuration-management tools such as Ansible

Ability to diagnose complex, cross-layer infrastructure issues

Strong communication and ability to drive technical decisions across teams

Track record of moving quickly, taking ownership, and continuously improving systems

Production Slurm experience

High-performance networking: NVLink/NVSwitch, InfiniBand, RoCEv2, GPUDirect RDMA, NCCL, IMEX

Hugepages, NUMA, CPU pinning

SR-IOV, DPDK

Distributed storage: Ceph, Lustre, Weka

KubeVirt, OpenStack

IPsec, WireGuard, Tailscale

VXLAN, BGP, ECMP

Bare-metal management: BMC, IPMI, Redfish, PXE/iPXE, Kickstart, cloud-init

Network automation: NetBox, Nautobot, Nornir

AI training, inference, or distributed GPU workload infrastructure

Python or Go proficiency

What we offer at fal

Interesting and challenging work

A lot of learning and growth opportunities

We offer visa sponsorship and will help you relocate to San Francisco.

Health, dental, and vision insurance (US)

Regular team events and offsites

Compensation

$180,000 - $250,000 + equity + comprehensive benefits package

U.S. EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY INFORMATION:

fal provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by applicable law.