Principal Software Engineer - Compute (Kubernetes)

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Vantage Compute to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators. At Vantage Compute, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there. A career at Vantage Compute means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone. We are seeking a visionary Principal Software Engineer to join our Compute organization and provide technical leadership for our Kubernetes infrastructure. You will drive the evolution of a platform that powers our global scale operations, transforming Kubernetes into a secure, reliable, and invisible foundation for our developers across our on-prem and public cloud fleet. Your mission is to balance cutting-edge innovation with rigorous platform stability, ensuring that internal and external customers have a seamless, high-performance experience at massive scale. You Will: Architectural Leadership: Serve as a technical lead for our Kubernetes ecosystem, setting the long-term architectural strategy for a platform that manages thousands of nodes and supports millions of concurrent requests. Customer Focus: Think deeply about how our internal customers consume and interact with compute, designing intuitive interfaces and tooling that simplify consumption of complex infrastructure services. Deep-Dive Engineering: Leverage deep expertise in Kubernetes internals, including custom controllers, operators, API server architecture, and etcd, to solve complex scaling bottlenecks and optimize our control plane. Secure Multi-tenancy: Architect robust security, isolation, and identity solutions that allow diverse workloads to safely coexist at scale. Operational Excellence: Lead the design of advanced automation, observability, and self-healing systems that minimize MTTR and maintain world-class uptime for our global compute fleet. Strategic Influence: Partner with engineering leadership to define the technical roadmap, balancing feature velocity against platform integrity. Mentorship: Foster a culture of technical excellence across the Compute organization through rigorous architectural reviews, code standards, and the active mentorship of senior and staff-level engineers. You Have: Experience: 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure. Kubernetes Expertise: Demonstrated expertise in Kubernetes internals, with a track record of modifying or extending the Kubernetes ecosystem (custom controllers, operators, upstream contributions). Production Scale: A history of building and operating mission-critical infrastructure platforms that serve thousands of nodes or high-throughput, low-latency microservices. Security & Networking: Deep understanding of cloud-native security practices, identity solutions, and container networking. Technical Leadership: Proven track record as a technical anchor, with the ability to communicate complex concepts, influence cross-functional stakeholders, and lead initiatives across multiple teams. For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page . Annual Salary Range $345,040 — $399,420 USD Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted). Vantage Compute provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Vantage Compute also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process. For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.