Senior Infrastructure Software Engineer

Job Application for Senior Infrastructure Software Engineer at Lightning AI

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Who We Are

Lightning AI is the company behind PyTorch Lightning. Founded in 2019, we build an end-to-end platform for developing, training, and deploying AI systems—designed to take ideas from research to production with less friction.

Through our merger with Voltage Park, a neocloud and AI Factory, Lightning AI combines developer-first software with cost-efficient, large-scale compute. Teams get the tools they need for experimentation, training, and production inference, with security, observability, and control built in.

We serve solo researchers, startups, and large enterprises. Lightning AI operates globally with offices in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and London, and is backed by Coatue, Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Firstminute.

The Way We Work

The people who thrive here are builders who move fast, communicate openly, take ownership, and continuously improve themselves, their teams, and our company. Here's what that looks like in practice:

Move with Urgency: We move quickly, make thoughtful decisions, and keep momentum. We value action over perfection and learn by shipping.

Take Ownership: We own outcomes, not just our individual work. We make decisions that move the company forward and follow through.

Communicate Openly: We communicate directly, seek to understand, and create clarity for others. Honest conversations help us move faster together.

Build Great Teams: We lead by example, empower others, and create healthy teams where people can do their best work.

Raise the Bar: We're always improving ourselves. We learn from feedback, consistently challenge ourselves to grow, and focus on the work that matters most.

Think Long-Term: We design for what's next. We create scalable systems, simplify complexity, and use AI and automation to amplify our impact.

About the Role

Lightning AI is seeking a Senior Infrastructure Software Engineer to join our Infrastructure Engineering team.

Our Infrastructure Engineering team builds the software systems that operate and manage Lightning AI’s large-scale GPU and bare-metal infrastructure. We develop services, APIs, tooling, and automation that bridge the gap between our physical infrastructure and the systems our customers depend on for AI/ML training, inference, and HPC workloads.

In this role, you will build production software and automation that support infrastructure throughout its lifecycle, from provisioning and bring-up through monitoring, maintenance, and decommissioning. You will design systems that enable engineers and software to interact programmatically with thousands of servers, storage systems, and high-performance networks, reducing manual operations and making infrastructure management more reliable, repeatable, and scalable.

This is a software-first infrastructure role that combines strong software engineering with Linux systems and hardware-aware infrastructure automation. You will work closely with teams across Infrastructure, Networking, Data Center Operations, and Platform Engineering to bring new capacity online and continuously improve how we operate our infrastructure at scale.

This role is based in one of our hubs (NYC, SF, Seattle, or London), with a minimum of 2 in-office days per week and occasional team and company offsites. We are not able to provide visa sponsorship for this position at this time.

What You Will Do

Infrastructure Software & Automation

Design, build, and operate production services, APIs, tooling, and automation for managing large-scale bare-metal and GPU infrastructure

Build and extend software systems that support infrastructure provisioning, configuration, monitoring, and lifecycle management

Develop reliable automation that reduces manual operational work and improves the consistency and scalability of infrastructure management

Build tools and interfaces that enable engineers and other systems to interact programmatically with physical infrastructure

Provisioning & Lifecycle Management

Build and extend systems for server discovery, provisioning, configuration, validation, and lifecycle management

Automate infrastructure bring-up and capacity deployment across large fleets of compute systems

Integrate software and automation with hardware management and provisioning systems

Improve tooling and workflows for managing infrastructure throughout its production lifecycle

Reliability & Observability

Build telemetry, logging, and observability capabilities that provide visibility into the health of our infrastructure

Develop tools and automation to identify, diagnose, and respond to infrastructure and hardware issues

Translate recurring operational issues and hardware failure modes into improvements to software, tooling, and automation

Improve the reliability and scalability of infrastructure operations as the fleet grows

Architecture & Collaboration

Partner with Network, Infrastructure Operations, Data Center, Platform Engineering, and other teams to define requirements and build new infrastructure capabilities

Participate in architectural discussions and help define the technical direction of Lightning AI’s infrastructure software

Make pragmatic design decisions that balance reliability, scalability, simplicity, and speed of execution

Write clear design documents and technical documentation and contribute to engineering best practices

Who You Are

Required Qualifications

8+ years of professional software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or related experience

Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production backend systems in Python or similar object-oriented programming languages

Strong experience with Linux in production environments

Experience building APIs, tooling, or automation for managing infrastructure at scale

Familiarity with containerization and orchestration concepts

Understanding of HPC and bare-metal infrastructure fundamentals, including provisioning and out-of-band management

Ability to navigate ambiguity and make pragmatic architecture decisions while building for long-term reliability and scale

Experience working in a startup or other fast-paced environment with a high degree of ownership and autonomy

Ideal Experience

Experience with bare-metal hardware troubleshooting and provisioning, including...