Senior Staff Cloud Native Software Engineer

About the Role (Job Purpose) The Senior Staff Cloud Native Software Engineer is a pillar-level technical leader responsible for the long-term coherence, roadmap, and architectural quality of a broad area of Nscale’s cloud-native platform. This role spans multiple related teams and domains, ensuring that platform capabilities evolve in a consistent, scalable, and strategically useful way. This role combines hands-on technical depth with broad architectural leadership. You will define multi-year direction across a platform pillar, lead major cross-team initiatives, and establish standards and engineering practices that are adopted widely. You will work through influence rather than formal authority, aligning teams around a common direction while remaining grounded in the realities of implementation and operations. As a Senior Staff engineer, you are expected to solve ambiguous, high-leverage problems that cut across systems and teams. You will identify systemic technical risks, reduce fragmentation, and help multiple teams make better decisions by creating clarity, shared patterns, and a stronger architectural foundation. What You’ll be Doing (Responsibilities) Pillar Architecture & Roadmap - Define and evolve the technical roadmap for a broad platform pillar spanning multiple related teams or domains - Lead major architectural initiatives that affect multiple subsystems, services, or platform capabilities - Ensure architectural decisions made across teams contribute to a coherent long-term platform direction - Identify systemic weaknesses, duplication, and architectural drift, and drive corrective action before they become entrenched - Translate strategic product, infrastructure, and platform goals into clear technical direction for multiple teams Standards, Patterns & Governance - Define and maintain pillar-wide standards for: - controller and operator design - API and CRD design - compatibility, versioning, and deprecation - observability, rollout, and operational behaviour - Ensure consistency across teams in Kubernetes usage, reconciliation semantics, service boundaries, and failure handling - Create shared abstractions, reference implementations, and engineering guardrails that increase consistency without adding unnecessary bureaucracy - Review designs across the pillar to prevent divergence, local optimisation, and accidental coupling between teams High-Leverage Technical Leadership - Drive ambiguous, high-impact technical work that does not fit neatly within a single team’s ownership - Unblock multiple teams by resolving difficult technical trade-offs and clarifying architectural direction - Act as a senior technical advisor to engineering leadership for the platform pillar - Maintain enough hands-on engagement to validate major design choices, guide implementation, and retain technical credibility - Improve the effectiveness of teams through strong technical writing, design reviews, and decision-making frameworks Mentoring & Capability Building - Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, helping grow technical leadership capability across the pillar - Raise the overall technical bar through architecture reviews, coaching, and knowledge sharing - Help shape how technical leadership operates across multiple teams by modelling strong judgement, influence, and clarity - Partner with managers and senior leaders to identify capability gaps and strengthen the organisation’s ability to execute complex technical work About You (Skills / Qualifications) - Demonstrated experience designing and evolving large-scale Kubernetes-native platform systems across multiple teams or domains - Proven ability to define and lead architecture across a broad platform area with significant ambiguity and long time horizons - Strong track record of creating leverage through standards, roadmaps, shared abstractions, and cross-team technical leadership - Deep expertise in distributed systems, Kubernetes internals, control plane architecture, and production operational design - Experience leading major technical initiatives that span multiple teams and require sustained influence without formal authority - Strong judgement in balancing immediate delivery, platform consistency, operational realities, and long-term maintainability - Demonstrated ability to identify systemic technical risks and address them through architecture, standards, and technical alignment - Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to drive adoption of technical direction across a broad engineering area - Strong mentoring track record, particularly in helping senior engineers grow into Staff-level technical leaders - Strong grounding in Linux, networking, and infrastructure fundamentals, including sufficient depth to reason through complex cross-layer behaviour - Working knowledge of GPU-backed platforms or AI workload constraints is highly valuable The range below reflects the base salary for the position. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related factors such as skill set, experience, education, and location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus, equity, and/or commission programs. Nscale may offer a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation. Salary Range $230,000—$320,000 USD For information on how Nscale handles candidate personal data, please see our Employee & Candidate Privacy Notice: Here. Nscale does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions from recruitment agencies.