Software Engineer, Compute (8+ YOE)

Location: San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; Remote - US

Department: Engineering

The Compute Platform team is responsible for building and evolving the infrastructure that powers Airtable’s services at scale. We enable engineers across the company to build, deploy, and operate reliable services on Kubernetes with strong security, governance, and performance guardrails.

We are looking for an engineer to help lead the next phase of platform maturity in how we run Kubernetes at Airtable. This is a role that has engineering wide impact. If you’re excited about building internal platforms, shaping infrastructure strategy, and partnering closely with product and security teams to power a rapidly growing enterprise business, we’d love to hear from you.

What You’ll Do:

Build and evolve Airtable’s compute platform

• Design, implement, and scale core Kubernetes platform capabilities used across ~70 clusters, spread across multiple environments.
• Lead foundational modernization efforts such as migrating to a new CNI plugin to overhaul IP security rule management across clusters and regions
• Rewrite our core deployment service from Typescript to Golang and adopt performant Kubernetes operator patterns to eliminate scaling bottlenecks on our larger clusters

Raise the bar on platform maturity

• Improve developer experience around new service creation, deployment workflows, and operational best practices
• Partner with Security to implement governance controls, least privilege access, image signing, and enterprise-grade infrastructure safeguards
• Define and uphold operational excellence standards across the platform by defining good SLOs, measuring and upholding them

Lead through technical influence

• Spend roughly 70% of your time in hands-on engineering and 30% in design reviews, mentorship, and cross-team collaboration
• Review architecture proposals and guide high-impact infrastructure decisions
• Mentor engineers on distributed systems and Kubernetes platform design
• Collaborate closely with developers building and deploying services across Airtable

Who You Are:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise building and operating a Kubernetes based internal service platform, 
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes internals, including controllers/operators, CRDs, networking, and cluster architecture
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, OpenTofu, Pulumi, or similar
• Experience with CI/CD and deployment tooling such as Spinnaker, ArgoCD, Flux, Jenkins, or similar
• Clear, thoughtful communicator who collaborates effectively across many engineering teams
• Empathetic partner to product engineers, with a strong sense of ownership and autonomy
• Preferably experience with AWS infrastructure and EKS

Airtable is an equal opportunity employer. We embrace diversity and strive to create a workplace where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or any characteristic protected by applicable federal and state laws, regulations and ordinances. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant. 

VEVRAA-Federal Contractor

If you have a medical condition, disability, or religious belief/practice which inhibits your ability to participate in any part of the application or interview process, please complete our Accommodations Request Form and let us know how we may assist you. Airtable is committed to participating in the interactive process and providing reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants.