Software Engineer - Infrastructure

<p>&nbsp;</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">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.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Since public launch, Emergent has reached <strong>$100M ARR in 8 months. 6M+ users across 190+ countries</strong> have built <strong>6.5M+ applications</strong> on Emergent. We've raised <strong>$100M+</strong>, backed by <strong>Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed, Prosus, Together, and Y Combinator.</strong></p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">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 <strong>repeat founders, Olympiad medalists, IIT &amp; IIM alumni,</strong> and leaders from <strong>Google, Amazon, and Dropbox.</strong></p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">We're hiring builders who want ownership, speed, and impact at global scale.</p> <p><strong>What You'll Be Responsible For</strong></p> <p><strong>Platform &amp; Infrastructure</strong></p> <ul> <li>Maintain stability of our platform consisting of distributed microservices closely interacting with Kubernetes and cloud providers (GCP, AWS)</li> <li>Manage Kubernetes workloads with&nbsp;<strong>ArgoCD</strong>&nbsp;(GitOps) — deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot application syncs, resource trees, and rollouts</li> <li>Debug and resolve complex Kubernetes issues across clusters</li> <li>Manage&nbsp;<strong>CDN and edge infrastructure</strong>&nbsp;(Cloudflare) for performance, caching, and traffic management</li> <li>Automate infrastructure lifecycle operations and workflows</li> </ul> <p><strong>Observability &amp; Incident Response</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own the observability stack:&nbsp;<strong>Grafana</strong>&nbsp;(dashboards, Loki logs, Prometheus metrics),&nbsp;<strong>New Relic</strong>&nbsp;(APM, golden metrics, transaction analysis)</li> <li>Enhance monitoring, alerting, and distributed tracing across services</li> <li>Participate in on-call rotation via&nbsp;<strong>PagerDuty</strong>, handle incident response, and perform root cause analysis</li> <li>Proactively identify reliability risks before they become incidents</li> </ul> <p><strong>AI Agent Infrastructure</strong></p> <ul> <li>Support the platform that runs AI agent workloads — job scheduling, trajectory tracking, environment provisioning, deployments and cost attribution</li> <li>Develop Kubernetes controllers and operators to extend platform capabilities for agent orchestration</li> </ul> <p><strong>Collaboration &amp; Internal Tooling</strong></p> <ul> <li>Work closely with product and backend teams to ensure platform scalability and reliability</li> <li>Build internal tools, automate workflows, and integrate systems to improve team productivity</li> <li>Stay current with Kubernetes releases, CNCF ecosystem updates, and cloud-native best practices</li> </ul> <p><strong>What We're Looking For</strong></p> <p><strong>Core Requirements</strong></p> <ul> <li>3+ years of software/platform engineering experience with production systems</li> <li>Strong proficiency in&nbsp;<strong>Go</strong>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<strong>Python</strong>&nbsp;— you write production code in at least one daily</li> <li>Hands-on experience&nbsp;<strong>building and deploying services on Kubernetes</strong>&nbsp;— not just YAML, you've developed something that runs on K8s</li> <li>Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux, or similar)</li> </ul> <p><strong>Systems Fundamentals</strong></p> <ul> <li>Strong&nbsp;<strong>networking and DNS fundamentals</strong>&nbsp;— TCP/IP, HTTP, load balancing, DNS resolution, TLS, and debugging connectivity issues</li> <li>Solid&nbsp;<strong>Linux/OS fundamentals</strong>&nbsp;— process management, filesystem, memory, systemd, and comfortable debugging with tools like strace, tcpdump, and netstat</li> </ul> <p><strong>Data &amp; Messaging Infrastructure</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Relational databases</strong>&nbsp;— experience with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or similar; indexing, query optimization, replication, and backup/restore procedures</li> <li><strong>NoSQL databases</strong>&nbsp;— familiarity with MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis, or similar for document/key-value workloads</li> <li><strong>Caching</strong>&nbsp;— experience with Redis, Memcached, or similar for application and infrastructure-level caching</li> <li><strong>Message queues &amp; streaming</strong>&nbsp;— hands-on with Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, or similar for event-driven architectures</li> <li>Strong SQL skills for debugging and operational queries</li> </ul> <p><strong>Infrastructure &amp; Observability</strong></p> <ul> <li>Comfortable with the&nbsp;<strong>CNCF ecosystem</strong>&nbsp;— Helm, Kustomize, cert-manager, Ingress controllers, CNI/CSI interfaces</li> <li>Hands-on with at least one observability stack (Grafana/Prometheus/Loki, New Relic, Datadog, or similar)</li> <li>Familiarity with&nbsp;<strong>GCP</strong>&nbsp;and/or&nbsp;<strong>AWS</strong>&nbsp;— managed Kubernetes (GKE/EKS), networking, IAM, storage, and cloud-native services (SES, SQS, S3, etc.)</li> <li>Experience with&nbsp;<strong>CDN/edge platforms</strong>&nbsp;(Cloudflare, CloudFront, or similar)</li> </ul> <p><strong>Nice to Have</strong></p> <ul> <li>Experience building&nbsp;<strong>Kubernetes Operators</strong>&nbsp;(kubebuilder, operator-sdk, or controller-runtime)</li> <li>Experience tuning Kubernetes core components (API server, kubelet, scheduler)</li> <li>Familiarity with AI/LLM infrastructure — token management, cost tracking, agent orchestration</li> <li>Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, automated testing, deployment pipelines)</li> <li>Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar)</li> <li>Previous work on large-scale distributed systems or platform-as-a-service</li> <li>Startup experience — you thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments</li> </ul> <p><strong>What You're Like</strong></p> <ul> <li>You're a&nbsp;<strong>generalist</strong>&nbsp;who can context-switch between debugging a K8s deployment, setting up a Grafana alert, and configuring CDN rules — all in the same day</li> <li>You enjoy solving complex infrastructure challenges and automating away toil</li> <li>You dig deep — when something breaks, you find the root cause, not just the workaround</li> <li>You communicate clearly and can collaborate effectively in a fast-moving, distributed team</li> </ul> <p><strong>Tech Stack</strong></p> <p>We don't require previous experience with our entire stack, but enthusiasm for learning is key.</p> <p>Go&nbsp;·&nbsp;Python&nbsp;·&nbsp;Kubernetes&nbsp;·&nbsp;ArgoCD&nbsp;·&nbsp;Helm&nbsp;·&nbsp;GCP&nbsp;·&nbsp;AWS&nbsp;·&nbsp;Cloudflare&nbsp;·&nbsp;Grafana&nbsp;·&nbsp;Prometheus&nbsp;·&nbsp;Loki&nbsp;·&nbsp;New Relic&nbsp;·&nbsp;PagerDuty&nbsp;·&nbsp;PostgreSQL&nbsp;·&nbsp;MongoDB&nbsp;·&nbsp;Redis&nbsp;·&nbsp;Kafka&nbsp;·&nbsp;GitHub</p> <p><strong>Why Emergent Labs</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>YC S24</strong>&nbsp;backed with strong investor support</li> <li>Building at the frontier of AI-powered software creation</li> <li>Small team, high ownership, real impact from day one</li> </ul> <p><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p>