Software Engineer - Infrastructure

Emergent builds autonomous coding agents that replace traditional software development by generating, testing, and deploying production applications directly from plain-language intent. Our systems run in production at global scale and are used to build millions of real applications. Since public launch, Emergent has reached $100M ARR in 8 months. 6M+ users across 190+ countries have built 6.5M+ applications on Emergent. We've raised $100M+ , backed by Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed, Prosus, Together, and Y Combinator. We're solving the hard part of AI-driven software creation: correctness, reliability, security, and scale in real production systems. The team is built by repeat founders, Olympiad medalists, IIT & IIM alumni, and leaders from Google, Amazon, and Dropbox. We're hiring builders who want ownership, speed, and impact at global scale. What You'll Be Responsible For Platform & Infrastructure Maintain stability of our platform consisting of distributed microservices closely interacting with Kubernetes and cloud providers (GCP, AWS) Manage Kubernetes workloads with  ArgoCD  (GitOps) — deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot application syncs, resource trees, and rollouts Debug and resolve complex Kubernetes issues across clusters Manage  CDN and edge infrastructure  (Cloudflare) for performance, caching, and traffic management Automate infrastructure lifecycle operations and workflows Observability & Incident Response Own the observability stack:  Grafana  (dashboards, Loki logs, Prometheus metrics),  New Relic  (APM, golden metrics, transaction analysis) Enhance monitoring, alerting, and distributed tracing across services Participate in on-call rotation via  PagerDuty , handle incident response, and perform root cause analysis Proactively identify reliability risks before they become incidents AI Agent Infrastructure Support the platform that runs AI agent workloads — job scheduling, trajectory tracking, environment provisioning, deployments and cost attribution Develop Kubernetes controllers and operators to extend platform capabilities for agent orchestration Collaboration & Internal Tooling Work closely with product and backend teams to ensure platform scalability and reliability Build internal tools, automate workflows, and integrate systems to improve team productivity Stay current with Kubernetes releases, CNCF ecosystem updates, and cloud-native best practices What We're Looking For Core Requirements 4+ years of software/platform engineering experience with production systems Strong proficiency in  Go  or  Python  — you write production code in at least one daily Hands-on experience  building and deploying services on Kubernetes  — not just YAML, you've developed something that runs on K8s Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux, or similar) Systems Fundamentals Strong  networking and DNS fundamentals  — TCP/IP, HTTP, load balancing, DNS resolution, TLS, and debugging connectivity issues Solid  Linux/OS fundamentals  — process management, filesystem, memory, systemd, and comfortable debugging with tools like strace, tcpdump, and netstat Data & Messaging Infrastructure Relational databases  — experience with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or similar; indexing, query optimization, replication, and backup/restore procedures NoSQL databases  — familiarity with MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis, or similar for document/key-value workloads Caching  — experience with Redis, Memcached, or similar for application and infrastructure-level caching Message queues & streaming  — hands-on with Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, or similar for event-driven architectures Strong SQL skills for debugging and operational queries Infrastructure & Observability Comfortable with the  CNCF ecosystem  — Helm, Kustomize, cert-manager, Ingress controllers, CNI/CSI interfaces Hands-on with at least one observability stack (Grafana/Prometheus/Loki, New Relic, Datadog, or similar) Familiarity with  GCP  and/or  AWS  — managed Kubernetes (GKE/EKS), networking, IAM, storage, and cloud-native services (SES, SQS, S3, etc.) Experience with  CDN/edge platforms  (Cloudflare, CloudFront, or similar) Nice to Have Experience building  Kubernetes Operators  (kubebuilder, operator-sdk, or controller-runtime) Experience tuning Kubernetes core components (API server, kubelet, scheduler) Familiarity with AI/LLM infrastructure — token management, cost tracking, agent orchestration Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, automated testing, deployment pipelines) Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) Previous work on large-scale distributed systems or platform-as-a-service Startup experience — you thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments What You're Like You're a  generalist  who can context-switch between debugging a K8s deployment, setting up a Grafana alert, and configuring CDN rules — all in the same day You enjoy solving complex infrastructure challenges and automating away toil You dig deep — when something breaks, you find the root cause, not just the workaround You communicate clearly and can collaborate effectively in a fast-moving, distributed team Tech Stack We don't require previous experience with our entire stack, but enthusiasm for learning is key. Go · Python · Kubernetes · ArgoCD · Helm · GCP · AWS · Cloudflare · Grafana · Prometheus · Loki · New Relic · PagerDuty · PostgreSQL · MongoDB · Redis · Kafka · GitHub Why Emergent Labs YC S24  backed with strong investor support Building at the frontier of AI-powered software creation Small team, high ownership, real impact from day one Benefits and Perks: 401(k) Health, dental, and vision insurance Unlimited Paid Time Off: take the time you need to recharge and come back refreshed Flexible Working Hours: work arrangements that fit your life and commitments Let's build the future of soft