Principal Member of Technical Staff, Core Infrastructure

📋 Job Overview

Edison Scientific builds and deploys AI scientist agents to accelerate science and the development of new medicines. We are an ambitious team run by scientists and engineers from leading institutions across biology, physics, chemistry, and AI. As a Principal Member of Technical Staff you'll play a key role in designing, scaling, and operating the core platform infrastructure that powers autonomous scientific discovery. Your primary focus will be the orchestration for our agents at scale, building and managing clusters that orchestrate thousands of persistent, stateful workloads, developing custom resource definitions (CRDs) and operators, and ensuring the reliability and efficiency of our compute layer at scale. This role is on-site at our San Francisco office in the Dogpatch neighborhood. Our office is a converted warehouse with high ceilings, open space, and a team that genuinely believes in what they're building. This position is part of the Platform Infrastructure team.

🏢 About Edison Scientific

Edison Scientific builds and deploys AI scientist agents to accelerate science and the development of new medicines. We are an ambitious team run by scientists and engineers from leading institutions across biology, physics, chemistry, and AI.

🎯 The Role

As a Principal Member of Technical Staff you'll play a key role in designing, scaling, and operating the core platform infrastructure that powers autonomous scientific discovery. Your primary focus will be the orchestration for our agents at scale, building and managing clusters that orchestrate thousands of persistent, stateful workloads, developing custom resource definitions (CRDs) and operators, and ensuring the reliability and efficiency of our compute layer at scale. Our mission is to build an AI scientist, and you'll own the infrastructure foundation it runs on. AI agents performing long-running scientific research demand resilient scheduling, lifecycle management, and resource orchestration far beyond typical cloud-native workloads. This role will influence platform architecture, establish infrastructure best practices, and partner closely with backend engineers, ML engineers, and researchers to deliver a production-grade environment that lets science move faster. At Edison Scientific, engineering at the senior level is about technical ownership and leverage- understanding how complex systems interact, making sound architectural tradeoffs, and building foundations that allow teams and science to move faster.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Architect, implement, and operate Kubernetes clusters that support thousands of concurrent, persistent resources (agents, jobs, services) with high availability and efficient resource utilization.
• Design and develop custom resource definitions (CRDs) and Kubernetes operators to model and manage domain-specific workloads such as AI agent lifecycles, research pipelines, and long-running compute tasks.
• Drive the strategy for cluster scaling, node pool management, autoscaling policies, and resource quota frameworks to handle rapid workload growth.
• Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) for reproducible, version-controlled environment management.
• Design and implement robust scheduling, placement, and affinity strategies to optimize cost, performance, and fault tolerance for heterogeneous workloads (CPU, GPU, memory-intensive).
• Establish and uphold best practices around observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response for infrastructure systems (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar).
• Own storage and networking strategy within Kubernetes — including persistent volume management, CSI drivers, service mesh, network policies, and ingress architecture.
• Troubleshoot complex, cross-system infrastructure issues and guide others through effective debugging and remediation in distributed environments.
• Collaborate closely with backend, ML, and research teams to understand workload requirements and translate them into reliable infrastructure patterns.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Typically, 10+ years of professional infrastructure or platform engineering experience, with deep hands-on Kubernetes expertise in production environments.
• Experience designing and implementing custom resource definitions (CRDs) and Kubernetes operators (using frameworks such as Kubebuilder, Operator SDK, or controller-runtime).
• Track record of operating and scaling Kubernetes clusters supporting thousands of persistent or long-lived resources (stateful workloads, persistent pods, long-running jobs).
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes internals — API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager, kubelet — and how they behave at scale.
• Expertise with cloud infrastructure (AWS EKS, GCP GKE, or Azure AKS) and associated networking, storage, and IAM primitives.
• Proficiency in at least one systems or backend language for operator development and infrastructure tooling.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Pulumi, or Crossplane) and GitOps workflows.
• Strong working knowledge of container networking (CNI plugins, service mesh, network policies), storage (CSI, persistent volumes, StatefulSets), and security (RBAC, Pod Security Standards, secrets management).
• Ability to operate autonomously, make sound technical judgments, and drive projects from concept through production.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience with data-intensive platforms, scientific computing, or ML/AI infrastructure.
• Prior experience in startups or small teams with significant architectural ownership and ambiguity.
• Experience scaling systems, teams, or platforms through periods of rapid growth.

🎁 Benefits

Salary: $200,000 - $350,000 • Offers equity
We're a fast-moving, mission-driven culture where smart people do their best work and actually enjoy doing it. We also offer full-time employees the following:

Competitive salary and equity
Full healthcare coverage; we pay 100% of premiums for you and your dependents
Support for growing families, including a yearly new parent stipend and fertility coverage through Carrot
Mental health support through Rula, our in-network therapist and psychiatrist network with fast availability
12 weeks of paid parental leave for maternity, paternity, and adoption
Pet care support with a yearly employer-funded stipend for your animal companions
Commuter benefits so you can pay for transit and parking with pre-tax dollars
401(k) company matching
$300 health and wellness benefit quarterly
Lunch is on us every day you're in the office

🛂 Visa & Eligibility