Staff Software Engineer (CTO Org)

Job description

As vCluster Labs’ **Staff Software Engineer**, you will operate as a specialized technical leader, working directly with the CTO to explore new frontiers in our technology. You will bridge the gap between rapid prototyping, architectural research, and product evolution, taking on responsibilities that go far beyond standard coding to shape the future of our Kubernetes virtualization platform. **As a Staff Software Engineer, your role will include:** - **Rapid Prototyping & Innovation:** Act as a specialized engineer who identifies interesting product opportunities, researches solutions, and quickly builds prototypes to validate if they work. You will report back on feasibility and guide the technical direction based on your findings. - **Strategic Technical Leadership:** Take ownership of responsibilities beyond coding, including managing complex technical projects, writing technical abstracts, and helping the wider engineering team navigate difficult challenges. - **Direct Collaboration with Leadership:** Work directly with the CTO and operate outside the traditional engineering organization boundaries to solve high-level problems and ideate on new product capabilities. - **System Mastery & Evolution:** Develop a deep understanding of our existing system while maintaining the agility to learn new things quickly. You will be responsible for integrating new technologies into our stack efficiently. - **Customer & External Engagement:** While primarily technical, this role includes customer-facing elements. You will occasionally engage with users to understand their deep technical needs and translate those into engineering solutions. **This role could be a fit for you if you bring:** - **Deep Kubernetes & GoLang Expertise:** You possess 3+ years of deep technical experience with Kubernetes and GoLang. You are comfortable diving into the internals of cloud-native infrastructure. - **High Autonomy:** You are a self-starter who can work on your own, figure out complex issues without hand-holding, and thrive in an environment where you are trusted to manage your own time and priorities. - **Beyond the Code:** You have experience that extends beyond just writing software. You understand the broader picture of product development, project management, and technical communication. - **Rapid Learning Agility:** You are quick to prototype and even quicker to learn. You enjoy the challenge of picking up new tools, languages, or architectural concepts on the fly to solve immediate problems. **Bonus points for:** - Deep understanding of cloud-native containers and the broader ecosystem. - Startup experience where you had significant technical influence and helped shape the product. - Experience writing technical content, such as abstracts, white papers, or blog posts. - Background in Platform Engineering or experience building internal developer platforms (IDPs). **About vCluster Labs** We are a venture-backed tech startup striving to be the leading force in enabling platform engineers. We raised +$30M from top-tier VCs such as [Khosla Ventures](https://www.khoslaventures.com/) (first investor in OpenAI, GitLab, Stripe, Doordash) and are in a hyper-growth phase looking for motivated people to complement our team. Our headquarters are in San Francisco (Salesforce Tower), but our team is distributed around the globe and we have a remote-first work culture. We are [vCluster](https://www.vcluster.com/), an open-source technology for [virtualizing Kubernetes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ-KG57ruvY) ([+10k GitHub stars](https://github.com/loft-sh/vcluster)). Open source is part of our DNA. The adoption of our commercial product based on vCluster has grown extremely fast (multi-million dollar revenue) and our customer base includes some of the biggest companies in the world, including 6 Global Fortune 500 companies as well as some of the fastest-growing tech unicorns and AI clouds (neoclouds). **Why join vCluster Labs?** Since we are a fast-moving startup, you will not be number 14,589 in our company but rather become an essential part of our team right from the start: - **Fast Application Process:** We will typically get back to you within a week. No need to polish your resume for us. Just send us some links (e.g. LinkedIn, etc.), answer a few questions about your previous experiences, and hop on a quick Zoom call with one of our team members to see if you’re a good fit. We will respond quickly and make hiring decisions within days rather than months. - **Open-Minded Work Environment:** You can always speak your mind - no company politics or unnecessary formalities. We are operating in a lean, honest, and efficient way and we are looking for different perspectives, constructive feedback and creative, motivated people who want to make a difference. - **Grow With The Company:** We are a small company right now but we are growing incredibly fast because we work on something that has a lot of value to engineering teams in large enterprises. Joining vCluster Labs early will give you the chance to advance much faster to the next step on the career ladder than in any larger company. - **Responsibility From Day 1:** You will see right from the start that your work will immediately have an impact in our company and you can shape the future of this company together with the rest of our team. ## **About vCluster Labs** We're the #1 platform for AI infrastructure, trusted by the world's fastest-growing AI cloud builders. We're a venture-backed startup that's raised over $28M from top-tier investors including Khosla Ventures (first investor in OpenAI, GitLab, Stripe, and DoorDash), and we're in a hyper-growth phase looking for motivated people to join our team. Our headquarters are in San Francisco (Salesforce Tower), but our team is distributed around the globe with a remote-first culture. We give AI Cloud providers and AI factories a hyperscaler-like experience on their own GPU infrastructure. Our platform runs the full stack an operator needs, from bare metal provisioning and node lifecycle management up through managed Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray, and inference clusters, so they can turn raw GPUs into cluster products they can sell in days instead of spending 12+ months building it themselves. Today we power over 100,000 GPUs and 1 million CPUs across 50+ AI clouds and Fortune 500 companies, backed by a team of 40+ infrastructure engineers who build alongside our customers rather than just shipping them software. We're the company behind vCluster, the open source technology for tenant isolation on Kubernetes, with 11,000+ GitHub stars and 40M+ tenant clusters created since 2021. Open source is part of our DNA. At KubeCon North America 2025, we launched our Infrastructure Tenancy Platform for AI, a Kubernetes-native framework built for running AI, ML, and GPU-intensive workloads anywhere, with an NVIDIA-validated reference architecture for DGX systems. **Benefits** We offer the following benefits: - **Competitive Salary**: We offer a competitive compensation package, including equity. - **Premium Insurance**: Health, dental, vision, and life Insurance, including plans for you and eligible dependents (benefits vary depending on country). - **Flexible Working Schedule:** You have a doctor’s appointment or need to head to the supermarket to get groceries at 2pm? We won’t have an issue with that. To us, results matter more than clocking in and out at the same time every day. - **Workplace Flexibility:** We’re very flexible about where you work. We know things can change in life and we’re happy to adjust the work environment for you along the way. ## ## **Culture & Values** At vCluster Labs, we value and stand for: 1. **Make it Happen:** We have a relentless bias for action and the grit to push through obstacles. We do whatever it takes to figure it out, put in the work, and ruthlessly prioritize the actions that drive measurable impact for the business. 2. **Own the Outcome:** We understand that our responsibility doesn't end when a task is checked off; it ends when the value is delivered. We connect our daily individual actions to the broader success of the company and our customers. 3. **Create Wow:** We measure success by the experience we generate, both inside and outside the company. For our customers, this means impressive speed and intuitive experiences. For our team, this means going the extra mile to support one another and to continuously drive each other to new heights. 4. **Open Source, Open Mind:** We are actively contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. Internally, we foster meritocracy — the strongest ideas win, no matter who or where they come from. 5. **Build Tomorrow’s Standards, Intentionally:** We don't just ship software; we define the state-of-the-art of tomorrow. We are fearless in tearing down old approaches to build something better, but we are disciplined in how we do it because we know our users rely on our technology to run mission-critical infrastructure platforms.