Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure (Backend)

Our newly formed Infrastructure Engineering team is looking for a Staff Software Engineer who wants to define what modern platform engineering looks like for the next generation of connected machines and robotics. 

We are a NYC-based team with a hybrid work model (3 days in office). 

What makes this role different

This isn't about maintaining legacy pipelines or babysitting infrastructure. You will treat our infrastructure, build systems, and deployment pipelines as high-value products, designing "golden paths" that allow our teams to ship complex code to edge devices, cloud services, and the Viam Registry with confidence and velocity.

You'll have significant autonomy to shape the direction of our platform, whether that's deep infrastructure optimization, developer experience innovation, or pioneering new approaches to edge reliability. Your work will have immediate, visible impact: the tools and systems you build will be used by developers building on the Viam platform. When customers deploy hardware drivers, train ML models, or ship new robotics capabilities through the Viam Registry, they'll be relying on the paved road you designed.

The scope 

This role blends deep systems engineering with a product mindset. You won't just keep the lights on; you will build the systems that allow Viam engineers to move faster and break less.

• Resilience at the Edge: Partner with engineering teams on projects requiring novel infrastructure solutions, building systems that bridge cloud and edge environments where traditional assumptions break down.
• Infrastructure as Product: Own the full lifecycle of our cloud infrastructure. You will use Terraform and Go to build abstractions that empower engineers with operational independence, rather than making them reliant on tickets and gatekeepers.
• Build the Golden Paths: Evolve our CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and local environments to be seamless. You will design testing infrastructure for complex hardware and cross-platform scenarios, including edge cases like flaky connectivity.
• Force Multiplier: Integrate AI/ML capabilities (like LLM-driven code generation or intelligent CI checks) into our tooling to eliminate toil and surface real-time insights.

Why this matters: The tooling you create won't just support internal teams. It will enable our customers to extend the platform with their own modules, services, and ML models. You aren't just building backend plumbing; you are building the engine that powers the Viam ecosystem.

What we're looking for

Technical foundation:

• We primarily use Go, but openness to learning and strong software engineering fundamentals matter more than current language expertise.
• You have strong debugging skills across networking, filesystems, permissions, and real-world edge constraints.
• You have experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS) and building complex CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, etc.).
• You have deep Linux systems experience (especially ARM/aarch64) but are also comfortable working across Windows and macOS environments.
• You have a solid grasp of managing resources via code (Terraform) rather than manual configuration.

How you work:

• You can drive initiatives independently and lead cross-team efforts in a high-context, fast-moving environment.
• You write clear documentation and design tools explicitly for others to build on and extend.
• You thrive on solving "gnarly" technical problems that don't have Stack Overflow answers.

Bonus points

• Familiarity with the CNCF landscape (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes) but with a pragmatic approach to adoption.
• Exposure to IoT, robotics, or hardware-software interface challenges.
• Experience with WebRTC or gRPC at the platform level.
• Experience building Internal Developer Platforms (IDP) or working in a dedicated Developer Productivity/DevEx team.

Why this role has room to grow

You'll be joining at the formation stage of this team, which means you'll help define:

• What platform engineering looks like for robotics and edge ML
• How we balance developer autonomy with infrastructure reliability
• Which problems are worth solving vs. which we can defer

This is a high-ownership, high-impact role where you can build something from the ground up, influence technical direction, and see your work shipped to production and into the hands of developers building the next generation of intelligent machines.

Starting salary is $220,000.