Engineering Tech Lead (vMetal)

As an Engineering Tech Lead on vMetal at vCluster Labs, you aren’t just running servers; you are the person who turns a rack of bare metal into a programmable platform. In this role, you will lead the engineering work behind vMetal, the systems that discover, provision, configure, and manage physical hardware so our customers can spin up tenant clusters on top of it. You will sit at the rare intersection of out-of-band server management and modern Go services, and you will set the technical bar as we grow the team. You will report to the VP of Engineering while we build out the team around you. As an Engineering Tech Lead, your role will include: vMetal Platform Leadership: Own the technical direction of vMetal. You will lead architecture decisions, drive the roadmap for bare metal provisioning and lifecycle management, and set the standard for code review and design quality on the team. Bare Metal Programmability: Build the Go services that turn raw hardware into APIs our customers can consume. You will design and ship the systems that drive Redfish, IPMI, and PXE workflows in production, not glue scripts, real services with clean interfaces and solid tests. Hardware Lifecycle Automation: Own how servers get discovered, inventoried, provisioned, configured, and reclaimed. You will eliminate manual intervention from the day-2 path and design for hardware that fails in surprising ways. Cross-Generational Architecture: Translate between traditional out-of-band server management and modern Kubernetes-native patterns. You will decide where the abstractions live and how vMetal exposes hardware to tenant clusters cleanly. Technical Mentorship & Hiring: Help grow the vMetal team. You will set the technical bar in interviews, partner with Fabian and Joseph on the loop, and mentor engineers as they ramp on bare metal-specific concepts. Customer-Driven Reliability: Partner with customer engineering and the broader platform team to debug, harden, and ship against real production workloads. You will be on-call for the systems you build and you will treat reliability as a first-class deliverable. This role could be a fit for you if you bring: Go Fluency: You write production Go for a living. You can design clean services, APIs, and libraries, not just script around someone else’s code. Bare Metal Operations Depth: You have shipped systems that drive servers via Redfish and IPMI in production, and you understand PXE boot end-to-end. You have debugged what happens when a BMC lies to you. Bare-Metal-as-a-Service Background: You have built or operated bare-metal-as-a-service offerings, an AI Cloud, or a hyperscaler bare metal team where infrastructure was the product. Bridging Generations: You hold both server management and modern API design in your head and can design between them. You are comfortable in IPMI, iDRAC, and ILO consoles, and equally comfortable shipping a Go controller. Technical Leadership: You have led engineers technically, through architecture decisions, code review, and hands-on mentorship, even if you have not formally managed people. You want to be the technical anchor of a team. Operator’s Instinct: You think about failure modes, telemetry, and recoverability before you ship. You have been on-call for the systems you have built and you treat that as a feature, not a tax. Bonus points for: Kubernetes Fluency: Comfort with Kubernetes internals, controllers, or operators — enough to design how bare metal hosts integrate cleanly with tenant clusters. AI Cloud / Hyperscaler Time: Production experience inside an AI Cloud, hyperscaler, or large platform team where bare metal scale was non-negotiable. Open Source Contributions: Meaningful contributions to projects in the bare metal, provisioning, or Kubernetes ecosystem, e.g., Tinkerbell, Metal3, Cluster API, Ironic. Career Pathing: Interest in eventually growing into an Engineering Manager or Architect path as the team scales. About vCluster Labs We are a venture-backed tech startup and the company pioneering Kubernetes virtualization for the AI era. We raised +$30M from top-tier VCs such as Khosla Ventures (first investor in OpenAI, GitLab, Stripe, Doordash) and are in a hyper-growth phase looking for motivated people to complement our team. Our headquarters are in San Francisco (Salesforce Tower), but our team is distributed around the globe and we have a remote-first work culture. We are the leading platform for operating GPU infrastructure, enabling AI Cloud providers to deliver a hyperscaler-like experience to their customers and AI factories that need to build that same experience for their internal teams. Our platform delivers the full operational stack operators need to run their GPU data centers — managed Kubernetes, fast isolated tenant provisioning, and automated node provisioning and lifecycle management — enabling them to accelerate time to value, reduce operational burden, and maximize the ROI of every GPU. We're the company behind vCluster, an open-source technology for virtualizing Kubernetes (10k+ GitHub stars, 40M+ virtual clusters created since 2021). Open source is part of our DNA. At KubeCon North America 2025, we launched our Infrastructure Tenancy Platform for AI — a Kubernetes-native framework purpose-built for running AI, ML, and GPU-intensive workloads anywhere, with an NVIDIA-validated reference architecture for DGX systems. Benefits We offer the following benefits: Competitive Salary : We offer a competitive compensation package, including equity. Platinum-Level Insurance : Health, dental, vision, and life Insurance, including plans for you and eligible dependents (benefits vary depending on country). Flexible Working Schedule: You have a doctor’s appointment or need to head to the supermarket to get groceries at 2pm? We won’t have an issue with that. To us, results matter more than clocking in and out at the same time every day. Workplace Flexibility: We’re very flexible about where you work. We know things can change in life and we’re happy to adjust the work environment for you along the way. Culture & Values At vCluster Labs, we value and stand for: Make it Happen: We have a relentless bias for action and the grit to push through obstacles. We do whatever it takes to figure it out, put in the work, and ruthlessly prioritize the actions that drive measurable impact for the business. Own the Outcome: We understand that our responsibility doesn't end when a task is checked off; it ends when the value is delivered. We connect our daily individual actions to the broader success of the company and our customers. Create Wow: We measure success by the experience we generate, both inside and outside the company. For our customers, this means impressive speed and intuitive experiences. For our team, this means going the extra mile to support one another and to continuously drive each other to new heights. Open Source, Open Mind: We are actively contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. Internally, we foster meritocracy — the strongest ideas win, no matter who or where they come from. Build Tomorrow’s Standards, Intentionally: We don't just ship software; we define the state-of-the-art of tomorrow. We are fearless in tearing down old approaches to build something better, but we are disciplined in how we do it because we know our users rely on our technology to run mission-critical infrastructure platforms.