Senior Platform Engineer

About Pier

Pier is a developer platform for shipping container-based applications to a production-ready environment. Every workload runs in a Firecracker microVM, giving tenants hardware-level isolation while staying fully OCI-compatible.

We're a small, highly technical team. We care deeply about correctness, operational simplicity, and building things that genuinely work at scale.

The role

We're looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to help build and operate the core infrastructure that Pier runs on. You'll work across the full stack: Kubernetes, Firecracker, Cilium, Postgres, and the Go services that tie everything together.

What you'll do

• Design and operate the Firecracker + Kata Containers runtime that underpins all customer workloads
• Build and maintain the Go-based controller, scheduler, and ingress services
• Improve the observability pipeline (Vector, Mimir, Quickwit)
• Contribute to the CI/CD and deployment infrastructure (Flux, Ansible, k3s)
• Work closely with the CLI and console teams to expose platform capabilities

What we're looking for

• Strong systems programming background — Go preferred, Rust a plus
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes internals (controllers, CRDs, admission webhooks)
• Comfort operating Linux systems at a low level (cgroups, namespaces, networking)
• Experience with hypervisor or container runtime work (KVM, containerd, runc, Firecracker, or Kata)
• A track record of shipping production infrastructure, not just side projects

Nice to have

• Familiarity with eBPF and Cilium
• Experience with Postgres at scale (replication, CNPG) or Prometheus-compatible metrics stores (Mimir, Thanos)
• Contributions to open source infrastructure projects

What we offer

• Competitive salary benchmarked to senior engineering market rates
• Fully remote — UK/EU timezone
• Meaningful equity in an early-stage company
• Hardware budget for your home setup
• No meetings culture; async-first communication