Frontend Engineer - Cluster OS Platform
clera · San Francisco · onsite
ABOUT THE ROLE
A well-funded early-stage Kubernetes infrastructure company is hiring a Frontend Engineer to design and build the interface for their flagship OS-like platform — an experience that makes distributed systems approachable for both individual tinkerers and production engineering teams. You'll help define interaction patterns, visualizations, and real-time UIs that translate complex cluster state into clear, actionable experiences. This is a high-impact, early-team role based on-site in San Francisco.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own the cluster management user interface, including provisioning flows, natural language interfaces, and real-time proactive system insights.
- Design and build visualization systems that make distributed state legible at a glance.
- Surface the right information by integrating with Kubernetes APIs, GitOps controllers, and gRPC/cRPC backends.
- Build real-time reactive UIs using Convex that scale from single users to large teams.
- Prototype new interaction patterns for infrastructure management, test assumptions quickly, and iterate based on feedback.
- Collaborate with backend and platform teams to design elegant protocols for the frontend.
- Establish frontend architecture patterns and best practices as an early engineering team member.
- Write maintainable, well-structured frontend code and champion code quality across the product.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Required
- Strong frontend fundamentals with a track record shipping user-facing infrastructure or developer tools.
- End-to-end experience building Next.js applications using React, Tailwind, and shadcn/ui.
- Experience or familiarity with Convex for real-time/reactive UI patterns.
- Production Kubernetes experience — internals, CRDs, operators, cluster architecture, etcd backup/restore, and troubleshooting cluster health.
- Infrastructure as Code proficiency with Terraform and Helm.
- Deep GitOps experience with ArgoCD and declarative infrastructure/continuous deployment patterns.
- Proficiency with observability tooling — Prometheus and Grafana for surfacing cluster health and performance.
- Comfortable working with complex state management that reflects real-world infrastructure.
- 5+ years working in production Kubernetes-based infrastructure.
- Strong Go skills for building system-level tooling, controllers, and distributed systems components.
Nice to Have
- Policy-as-code and security tooling for Kubernetes.
- Background in systems programming or distributed systems.
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their managed Kubernetes offerings.
- Track record shipping developer tools or infrastructure products.
- Familiarity with analytics tools such as PostHog.
LOCATION & WORK ARRANGEMENT
This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Remote work is not available for this position. Visa sponsorship is not available.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Competitive compensation commensurate with experience. Early-team equity opportunity at a venture-backed infrastructure startup.