Staff Software Engineer, Platform

Cake is on a mission to make cutting-edge AI accessible to enterprise teams. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will play a critical leadership role in building and operating the infrastructure that powers Cake’s AI platform, focusing on distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer experience.

Responsibilities:

• Leverage infrastructure-as-code to manage complex cloud environments supporting critical ML and AI initiatives
• Design Kubernetes-native systems, including controllers/operators where appropriate
• Improve platform networking, security, and observability
• Own critical systems in production, including reliability, scalability, security, and cost efficiency
• Identify and proactively address technical debt, operational risk, and platform bottlenecks
• Quickly ramp up to a complex tech stack (Terraform, Kubernetes, Istio, Crossplane, Go, TypeScript)
• Create abstractions and tooling that make it easier for teams and customers to deploy, run, and scale AI/ML workloads
• Collaborate directly with customers to understand their ML infrastructure challenges and translate them into platform improvements
• Balance speed and rigor—shipping quickly while maintaining a high bar for quality and safety
• Act as a technical leader and mentor across the engineering organization
• Write clear documentation and design proposals that align stakeholders and drive decisions
• Partner closely with product and leadership to shape platform direction and priorities

Requirements:

• 10+ years of engineering experience, with significant time spent on infrastructure, platform, or distributed systems
• Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production environments
• Strong cloud experience across AWS, GCP, and/or Azure
• Proven track record of building and operating secure, scalable AI/MLOps platforms
• Deep understanding of infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi, CDK)
• Strong programming skills in at least one backend language (Go preferred; TypeScript also welcome)
• Experience diagnosing and debugging complex production issues
• Familiarity with modern CI/CD, test-driven development, and DevSecOps practices
• Comfortable owning large, ambiguous problems from inception to production
• Excellent communicator, able to clearly explain complex systems to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience working directly with customers and incorporating feedback into technical decisions
• Ability to operate autonomously while keeping stakeholders informed and aligned
• Customer-first and product-oriented
• Curious, adaptable, and eager to learn new systems and domains
• Collaborative, respectful, and willing to lean into hard conversations
• Energized by fast-paced environments and meaningful responsibility
• Bonus: experience building Kubernetes operators and/or working with service meshes (e.g., Istio)