Software Engineer - Compute at Lambda
San Francisco, CA
$266,000–$395,000
Jul 29, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A software engineering role on the Compute team at an AI cloud infrastructure company, focused on building and maintaining bare-metal and VM provisioning systems for GPU-first cloud infrastructure. The work involves designing distributed services for compute instance lifecycle management, cluster orchestration, and internal platform tooling, with close collaboration across engineering, infrastructure, and vendor teams. Suited to engineers with hands-on production experience in Go or Python and a background in bare-metal and virtualization environments.
Mid level · 3+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
Quick apply — this platform usually takes a CV and a few fields.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 4 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 4,200 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 2,200–5,400
Applicant volume Heavy — This req sits in a large pool with little in its requirements to thin it, and auto-apply tools fire at everything in the occupation. Applying early and leading with the rare skills below is what gets read.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 1, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The posting names Go and Python as interchangeable options ('Go (Golang) or Python') — both are captured as a single requirement with the other as an alternative, but both are also listed separately as preferred to reflect that either satisfies the gate.
Bare-metal and virtualization hardware management is stated as a 3+ year hard requirement alongside Go/Python, but no specific tooling (e.g. IPMI, Redfish) is named beyond KVM/QEMU, which appear only in the Nice to Have section.
Slurm and Kubernetes are listed together under Nice to Have as cluster management alternatives — captured as a single preferred skill with the other as an alternative.
The salary range section references that a range 'has been set' but no actual figures are disclosed in the posting; compensation fields are left empty.
The role requires 4 days/week in-office across San Francisco, San Jose, or Bellevue offices — it is not remote. The CBSA is set to San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley as the primary/first-listed location.
The title 'Software Engineer' carries no explicit seniority level; the 3+ year experience floor and scope of work (independent troubleshooting, on-call ownership, cross-team collaboration) support a Mid classification. The alt SOC 15-1244 is noted because a significant portion of the role involves operating and managing compute infrastructure, though the primary emphasis on building and shipping software points to 15-1252.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): bare metal provisioning.
Read the full posting
The employer publishes the full description on their own site — read it there ↗. Or sign in to read it here — it's free, and it also lets you track this application.