Senior Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)
Clera · San Francisco, CA
$150,000–$200,000from the description
Jul 14, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A platform engineering role centered on building and extending a Kubernetes-based developer platform, including custom operators and controllers in Go, GitOps pipelines with ArgoCD, and federated multi-cluster architectures. The work spans infrastructure-as-code, distributed storage, container networking, and observability tooling. Suited to engineers with a solid Kubernetes and Go background who have built developer tools or infrastructure products.
Mid level · 2+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 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 670 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 510–880
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The role is titled 'Platform Engineer' with no level modifier, so advertised seniority is Unspecified. The 2+ years requirement and scope (early-team, hands-on building) support a Mid-level classification.
Go and Kubernetes appear together in a firm '2+ years of software development experience with a strong foundation in Go and Kubernetes' requirement — both treated as hard gates.
ArgoCD is listed under 'What we're looking for' with 'Proficiency with GitOps and ArgoCD'; CI/CD is explicitly called 'a plus' in the same sentence, so ArgoCD is required and CI/CD is preferred.
Terraform and Helm are listed as required ('hands-on experience with infrastructure provisioning tools such as Terraform and Helm'); Ansible and Kubespray are explicitly called 'a plus' in the same sentence.
Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is listed in the requirements section; all three are named as interchangeable options, so AWS is the primary with GCP and Azure as alternatives.
Service mesh and CNI plugins appear in the requirements section but are framed as background/context ('Background with service mesh technologies or CNI plugins') without firm gating language — treated as preferred given the softer framing.
Prometheus and Grafana appear only in the 'What you'll do' responsibilities narrative, not in the 'What we're looking for' requirements section — treated as preferred.
Open source contributions to the Kubernetes ecosystem are explicitly called 'a plus' — omitted as they name no specific technology.
The role is on-site in San Francisco with only 'occasional remote collaboration' noted — remote is false.
Read the full posting
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