(Senior) Software Engineer, Infrastructure (Kubernetes Platform)

Founded in 2016 in Silicon Valley, Pony.ai has quickly become a global leader in autonomous mobility and is a pioneer in extending autonomous mobility technologies and services at a rapidly expanding footprint of sites around the world. Operating Robotaxi, Robotruck and Personally Owned Vehicles (POV) business units, Pony.ai is an industry leader in the commercialization of autonomous driving and is committed to developing the safest autonomous driving capabilities on a global scale. Pony.ai’s leading position has been recognized, with CNBC ranking Pony.ai #10 on its CNBC Disruptor list of the 50 most innovative and disruptive tech companies of 2022. In June 2023, Pony.ai was recognized on the XPRIZE and Bessemer Venture Partners inaugural “XB100” 2023 list of the world’s top 100 private deep tech companies, ranking #12 globally. As of August 2023, Pony.ai has accumulated nearly 21 million miles of autonomous driving globally. Pony.ai went public at NASDAQ in November 2024.

Responsibilities

As a (Senior) Kubernetes Engineer, you will:

• Design, operate, and optimize Kubernetes clusters across hybrid cloud environments (public cloud and on-prem datacenter).
• Support diverse workloads including large-scale model training and low-latency inference services.
• Develop, maintain, and extend Kubernetes platform features (operators, CRDs, APIs) to automate and productize internal use cases.
• Own cluster lifecycle management including upgrades, patching, configuration, and governance.
• Define and enforce best practices for service deployments, security policies, and operational guidelines.
• Contribute to observability and SRE practices to ensure reliability at scale (SLOs, incident reviews, metrics-driven improvements).
• Collaborate with storage, compute, and networking teams (CNI, ingress, service discovery) to enhance automation, availability, and performance.
  Provide technical mentorship, documentation, and on-call support for cluster-related incidents.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience managing Kubernetes clusters in production (EKS/GKE/AKS and/or bare-metal).
• Strong Linux systems background and distributed systems fundamentals (scheduling, reliability, scaling).
• Proven experience with hybrid cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-prem).
• Expertise in containerization (Docker) and Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or similar).
• Experience developing and maintaining Kubernetes platform features (operators, CRDs, APIs).
• Solid knowledge of Kubernetes networking (CNI, ingress, service discovery), storage, and compute integrations.
• Strong understanding of security best practices (RBAC, network policies, secrets).
• Effective communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally in a fast-paced environment.

Preferred Experience

• Programming skills in Go and/or Python for operator development, platform automation, and tooling.
• Experience with observability and SRE practices (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog; SLOs, incident response, postmortems).
• Familiarity with workloads common to AI/ML systems (training, inference).

Compensation and Benefits

Base Salary Range: $120,000 - $240,000 Annually

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on many factors, including the candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies, experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Compensation and this role may be eligible for bonuses/incentives and restricted stock units.

Also, we provide the following benefits to the eligible employees:

• Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• Retirement Plan (Traditional and Roth 401k)
• Life Insurance (Basic, Voluntary & AD&D)
• Paid Time Off (Vacation & Public Holidays)
• Family Leave (Maternity, Paternity)
• Short Term & Long Term Disability
• Free Food & Snacks

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