Principal Infrastructure Engineer

San Francisco, CA - Hybrid
Contract

Join us as a Principal Infrastructure Engineer to design and deploy scalable, secure infrastructure for Nextdata OS across multi-cloud environments. Lead CI/CD automation, optimize deployments, and drive the future of decentralized data with cutting-edge Kubernetes-native technologies.

The role

As a Principal Infrastructure Engineer, you will lead the design and automation of how Nextdata OS is provisioned and operated across environments—primarily managed Kubernetes, often in customer-owned cloud accounts.

You will work on systems that directly shape how data mesh is adopted in practice.

You will bring experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, including data and ML infrastructure, to help deliver a secure, self-service platform for data product teams.

You will:

• Design and implement deployment models for PaaS, SaaS, and customer-managed environments

• Build scalable, modular infrastructure-as-code and maintain high code quality through reviews

• Work closely with customers to understand real-world constraints and requirements

• Collaborate with product and engineering to evolve the platform

• Take ownership of what you ship, including production reliability

You are the right fit if you have

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field

• 8+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering

• Experience and willingness to work directly with customers

• Experience working in early-stage or growing startups, shaping infrastructure from the ground up

• Strong experience with Kubernetes-based systems and multi-cloud environments

• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD systems for cloud-native applications

• Hands-on experience deploying and operating PaaS and SaaS platforms at scale

• Experience with data and ML ecosystems across platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform

• A track record of managing infrastructure cost and performance trade-offs

• Experience contributing to or leading security reviews and audits

• Strong troubleshooting skills and a focus on reliability

Technical depth in:

• Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS) and containerization (Docker)

• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)

• Cloud networking (AWS VPC, Azure VNet, Google Cloud Platform VPC)

• Observability tools (Prometheus, ELK or similar)

• Service meshes (Istio, Linkerd)

• Cloud security practices