Senior Backend Engineer, Managed Kubernetes & Slurm

About this role

Who We Are

Lightning AI is the company behind PyTorch Lightning. Founded in 2019, we build an end-to-end platform for developing, training, and deploying AI systems—designed to take ideas from research to production with less friction.

Through our merger with Voltage Park, a neocloud and AI Factory, Lightning AI combines developer-first software with cost-efficient, large-scale compute. Teams get the tools they need for experimentation, training, and production inference, with security, observability, and control built in.

We serve solo researchers, startups, and large enterprises. Lightning AI operates globally with offices in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and London, and is backed by Coatue, Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Firstminute.

The Way We Work

The people who thrive here are builders who move fast, communicate openly, take ownership, and continuously improve themselves, their teams, and our company. Here's what that looks like in practice:

• Move with Urgency: We move quickly, make thoughtful decisions, and keep momentum. We value action over perfection and learn by shipping.

• Take Ownership: We own outcomes, not just our individual work. We make decisions that move the company forward and follow through.

• Communicate Openly: We communicate directly, seek to understand, and create clarity for others. Honest conversations help us move faster together.

• Build Great Teams: We lead by example, empower others, and create healthy teams where people can do their best work.

• Raise the Bar: We're always improving ourselves. We learn from feedback, consistently challenge ourselves to grow, and focus on the work that matters most.

• Think Long-Term: We design for what's next. We create scalable systems, simplify complexity, and use AI and automation to amplify our impact.

What We're Looking For

Lightning AI runs one of the largest AI-native clouds, with 25,000+ H100, B200, and GB300 GPUs powering organizations building, training, and deploying AI at scale. To deliver that experience, our Managed Services team builds the systems that make complex GPU infrastructure simple, reliable, and easy for customers to use without managing the underlying infrastructure themselves.

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Managed Services team, you'll build the control planes, backend services, and automation that provision, operate, and scale Kubernetes and Slurm clusters across our GPU fleet. Your work will turn raw GPU capacity into production-ready environments where customers can seamlessly train models, run inference, and deploy AI workloads.

This isn't a traditional SaaS backend role. You'll solve challenging distributed systems and cloud infrastructure problems, building the automation and platform capabilities that keep large-scale Kubernetes and Slurm environments scalable, observable, and resilient.

This role is based in one of our U.S. office hubs (San Francisco, NYC, or Seattle, with SF and NYC preferred), with a minimum of 2 in-office days per week and occasional team and company offsites. We are not able to provide visa sponsorship for this position at this time.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operate backend services in Go or Python that power Lightning AI's managed infrastructure platform.

• Develop control plane services that provision, orchestrate, and manage Kubernetes and Slurm clusters across large-scale GPU infrastructure.

• Build distributed systems that automate cluster lifecycle management, workload scheduling, infrastructure provisioning, and platform operations..

• Develop platform capabilities using Kubernetes APIs, controllers, operators, and other cloud-native technologies.

• Improve the reliability, scalability, security, and observability of our managed platform through automation and operational excellence.

• Diagnose and resolve complex production issues across Kubernetes, distributed systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure.

• Collaborate with infrastructure, AI, and platform engineering teams to shape the future of our cloud platform.

• Contribute to technical design, architecture, mentoring, engineering best practices, and on-call operations.

What You’ll Need

Required Qualifications

• Significant professional experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems using Go or Python.

• Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes or Slurm, including operating large-scale production environments.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and production infrastructure.

• Experience designing and building scalable backend services, APIs, and automation for infrastructure or platform operations.

• Strong understanding of networking, storage, and cloud infrastructure fundamentals.

• Familiarity with observability, CI/CD, testing, production operations, and incident response.

• Ability to own complex technical projects while collaborating effectively across engineering teams.

Ideal Experience

Experience with one or more of the following:

• Kubernetes platform development, including operators, controllers, CRDs, or control plane components

• Slurm administration, scheduling, or HPC environments

• Infrastructure-as-Code or GitOps tooling such as Terraform, Crossplane, Helm, Argo CD, Flux, or Kustomize

• GPU infrastructure, AI platforms, or large-scale compute environments

• Kubernetes networking, storage, or multi-tenant platform architecture

• Event-driven systems, gRPC, or distributed messaging

• Building CI/CD systems for production environments

• Contributions to cloud-native or open source infrastructure projects

Compensation We are committed to offering competitive compensation that reflects the value each team member brings to our mission. Final offers are based on factors such as experience, skills, geographic location, and role expectations. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package for eligible roles includes a discretionary bonus, a

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