Senior Software Engineer

About Loft Labs

We are a venture-backed tech startup striving to be the leading force in enabling platform engineers. After closing our Series A lead by Khosla Ventures in Q1 2024, we are in the hyper-growth phase and 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're the company behind vCluster, an open-source technology for virtualizing Kubernetes (+40M virtual clusters created by users, vibrant Slack community with +3,000 members, +5k GitHub stars).

The adoption of our commercial product based on vCluster has grown extremely fast (multi-million dollar revenue, 4.6x ARR growth over the past 12 months), and our customer base now includes some of the biggest companies in the world including 6 Global Fortune 500 companies as well as some of the fastest-growing tech unicorns.

Working on developer tools and open-source technology is part of our DNA.
We are the maintainers of several popular open-source projects, including:

• vCluster - Virtual Kubernetes Clusters, a certified Kubernetes distribution with 40M+ downloads: www.vcluster.com

• DevPod - Codespaces but open-source, client-only, unopinionated was #1 on HackerNews twice after launch, +8,000 GitHub stars: www.devpod.sh

• DevSpace - CNCF Sandbox Project, 4,000+ GitHub stars: www.devspace.sh

Our customers include CoreWeave, Shipwire, GoFundMe, and several Fortune 500 companies, including one of the biggest chip manufacturers, one of the Big 4 audit and consulting firms, one of the biggest US financial institutions, and others.

Responsibilities

• Design and build new features for our open-source projects and for our commercial product

• Dive really deep into the inner workings of Kubernetes (controllers, CRDs, extension API servers, etc.) and work with some of the best Kubernetes engineers around

• Actively engage with our open-source users and customers. This usually involves a deep understanding of user challenges, uncovering root causes, suggesting bug fixes, driving enhancements, advising on best product configurations or inspiring new features

• Write Golang code that is easy-to-test, performant, bug-free (no worries, we know that that's an illusion), and well-structured

• Contribute to docs and tests for all projects you are working on to ensure we ship high-quality code and easy to use features for our enterprise customers and open-source community users

• Taking ownership for the full feature lifecycle - From talking to a customer, planning the implementation, writing the code, adding the tests, presenting to stakeholders, and finally shipping the feature as part of our release workflow

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and containers in general

• 4+ years of professional programming experience, with a strong proficiency in Golang

• Deep conceptual and architectural understanding of micro-services, containers and complex distributed systems

• A passion for cloud-native ecosystem, for example: CNCF projects, cloud-native developer tools, container build systems, and Kubernetes platforms

• A team player mindset that drives you towards open communication (English). That will help you and your colleagues to stay connected and keep everyone in the loop while being remote

• A special interest for building developer tooling and automation that will drive you to constantly improve and extend our tool suite for the benefit of our users and customers

• An appetite for sharing your code, findings and learnings publicly with our community users (we're largely open-source, remember?)

Benefits

We offer the following benefits:

• Competitive Salary: We tend to pay higher wages than other startups.

• 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: If you want to work from home, that’s great! If you’d prefer to work in a coworking space, we can make that happen as well. We’re flexible on all of this and we know things can change in life and we’re happy to adjust the work environment for you along the way.

Why join a startup like Loft Labs?

Since we are a fast-moving startup, you will not be number 14,589 in our company but rather become an essential part of our team right from the start:

• Fast Application Process: We will typically get back to you within a week. No need to polish your resume for us. Just send us some links (e.g. LinkedIn, etc.), answer a few questions about your previous experiences, and hop on a quick Zoom call with one of our team members to see if you’re a good fit. We will respond quickly and make hiring decisions within days rather than months.

• Open-Minded Work Environment: You can always speak your mind - no company politics or unnecessary formalities. We are operating in a lean, honest, and efficient way and we are looking for different perspectives, constructive feedback and creative, motivated people who want to make a difference.

• Grow With The Company: We are a small company right now but we are growing incredibly fast because we work on something that has a lot of value to engineering teams in large enterprises. Joining Loft Labs early will give you the chance to advance much faster to the next step on the career ladder than in any larger company.

• Responsibility From Day 1: You will see right from the start that your work will immediately have an impact in our company and you can shape the future of this company together with the rest of our team. Grow with us and benefit from being part of this journey from the start.

Culture & Values

At Loft Labs, we value and stand for:

• Technical Excellence: We are determined to build best-in-class technology and ship high-quality software because we know that our users are engineers themselves.

• Customer Obsession: We are going above and beyond to make our customers and users happy, which means striving for great usability, excellent documentation and support as well as fast response times for feature requests and bug reports.

• Impressive Speed: From user feedback to shipping a new feature to address this feedback, we usually take less than a week in most cases and our users absolutely love us for this.

• Bold Innovation: We are constantly questioning the state-of-the-art to find and address important issues in our space, even if that means abandoning any existing technologies and starting from scratch again.

• Open Source & Open Mind: We are actively contributing and maintaining open-source projects and we believe that building an open-minded team culture that respects different perspectives and welcomes constructive feedback is equally paramount to our success.

Loft Labs, Inc. provides equal opportunities for all candidates. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive work environment for everyone who becomes part of our team. We are also actively promoting measures to reduce bias throughout our hiring process to ensure that everyone gets the same opportunities.