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.