Staff Software Engineer- Kubernetes (Container Orchestration)

About the team:

As Robinhood’s infrastructure engineering, we are on a mission to provide Robinhood product teams a world-class platform that enables rapid product development by making infrastructure invisible and highly available.

The mission of Software Platform, of which Container Orchestration is a part, is to accelerate developer velocity and increase system reliability by building the foundational software platforms and tools that power the rest of Robinhood engineering.

The Container Orchestration team at Robinhood is solely responsible for building a highly available, horizontally scalable, secure, best in the industry (for Robinhood scale) offering of Kubernetes-powered container provisioning APIs that seamlessly integrate with the rest of infrastructure and platform offerings from other teams. This team’s primary focus is to proactively ensure scalability, reliability and availability of our Kubernetes distribution. This includes the deployment topology and configuration of the OSS components we build upon and all the extensions we build.

Container Orchestration is responsible for defining and implementing a cell based, multi-region architecture for Robinhood’s platform and infrastructure services. This helps the platform services scale without adding additional complexity to our application developers. APIs and systems managed by this team are also responsible for transparent platform integrations (sidecars, daemonsets) that offer core capabilities (Auth, Security, DNS, Load Balancing, Storage) offered to the tenants (applications) making this an area of huge importance to the overall safety and reliability of Robinhood and its value to be a safety-first company.

What you’ll do day-to-day:

• Design large scale systems within the team, making the right tradeoffs for risk and long-term maintainability.
• Proactively identify and drive optimizations and improvements to the infrastructure and systems.
• Set up and drive technical directions of the project while mentor and up-level junior engineers in the team.
• Lead organization-wide collaboration for the team.
• Contribute to open source projects.

About you:

• Expert knowledge of Kubernetes control plane and data plane components.
• Thorough understanding of the Kubernetes Platform and container lifecycle management.
• Experience with Kubernetes multi-cluster challenges and Kubernetes networking (e.g. CNI deployment and troubleshooting).
• Experience managing and debugging large scale infrastructure services in production.
• Proven seasoned individual contributor with experience planning and leading end to end large projects with long-term impact on one or more systems or a team.
• Have a passion for mentoring junior engineers and improving engineering craftsmanship.

Bonus points:

• Open source contributions to Kubernetes and other related projects.
• Prior experience scaling the Kubernetes platform at high-growth startups.
• Experience designing and managing other distributed systems at scale.

The expected salary range for this role is based on the location where the work will be performed and is aligned to one of 3 compensation zones. This role is also eligible to participate in a Robinhood bonus plan and Robinhood’s equity plan.

US Zone 1: $217,000 - $255,000

US Zone 2: $190,000- $224,000

US Zone 3: $169,000- $199,000

Base pay for the successful applicant will depend on a variety of job-related factors, which may include education, training, experience, location, business needs, or market demands. You can view comp zones for our US office locations in the table below. For other locations not listed, compensation can be discussed with your recruiter during the interview process.

Office locations (by comp zone)

US Zone 1: Menlo Park, NYC, Seattle, Washington DC

US Zone 2: Denver, Westlake (Dallas), Chicago

US Zone 3: Lake Mary

We’re looking for more growth-minded and collaborative people to be a part of our journey in democratizing finance for all. If you’re ready to give 100% in helping us achieve our mission—we’d love to have you apply even if you feel unsure about whether you meet every single requirement in this posting. At Robinhood, we're looking for people invigorated by our mission, values, and drive to change the world, not just those who simply check off all the boxes.

Robinhood promotes diversity and provides equal opportunity for all applicants and employees. We are dedicated to building a company that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work (and work environment) will be for everyone. Additionally, Robinhood provides reasonable accommodations for candidates on request and respects applicants' privacy rights. To review Robinhood's Privacy Policy please visit Robinhood - US Applicant Privacy Policy.