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.