Software Engineer, Compute Infrastructure

At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms—so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure. Unlike complex hyperscalers or ephemeral edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you're building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users. Our platform is trusted by over 6 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $257M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive—designed for the speed of modern AI development. We’re a diverse and talented team that values craft, velocity, and user experience. If you’re excited to help shape the future of the intelligent cloud and empower developers everywhere, we’d love to hear from you. APPLYING TO RENDER We're seeking candidates who possess high integrity, humility, and an insatiable drive to learn. Through reasoned discussions and continuous feedback, we strive to improve both individually and collectively. We foster an environment of mutual trust and respect, empowering effective debate to achieve the best outcomes for our customers and team. We especially encourage members of underrepresented groups in the tech community to apply and understand that not all successful candidates will meet each requirement listed. Our interview process is unique to each role, and we value the candidate experience just as much as our customer experience. We hope your conversations with us reflect a thoughtful process that is illuminative, enjoyable, and respectful of your time. ABOUT THE ROLE Render's mission is to eliminate the undifferentiated work that goes into building software products by offering an easy-to-use, powerful cloud platform for developer teams of all sizes. We are scaling rapidly. Our customers have created millions of services on our platform, and the numbers continue to accelerate. Our customers trust us to deliver a secure, reliable and performant cloud — this is our top priority as a company. By joining us at an early stage, you will design and build the cloud platform you've always wanted for yourself, and make decisions that will shape our product and company, directly impacting developers around the globe. Render builds and orchestrates a growing number of kubernetes clusters on different hyperscalers and recently, our own hardware. We leverage open source and industry-standard technologies, modifying and extending the core components to meet the unique reliability, performance, and scaling demands of our platform. We are looking for engineers with deep specialization in cloud and compute infrastructure. We are particularly interested in experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration, micro VMs, controllers, operators, and the automation and self-healing of large scale distributed systems. Areas of focus for the team this year will unlocking bottlenecks to scale our clusters while also automating the multi-step creation, configuration, testing, and tuning of Render clusters. We will expand Render to new regions, our own bare metal, and start orchestrating micro VMs outside of Kubernetes entirely. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own Render's core compute infrastructure across multiple cloud providers, regions, and data centers. You'll shape how we evolve our compute platform as we rapidly scale.

• Design and build capabilities that give users greater performance and flexibility in how their services are built, deployed, perform, and stay available even when underlying resources go down.
• Investigate challenging cloud and compute issues across the stack, from the kernel and data plane to our kubernetes cluster, control plane, and other orchestration mechanisms.
• Improve the performance and reliability of our infrastructure through systematic profiling, experimentation, and tuning.
• Partner with engineers across the company to build a platform that is stable, predictable, and secure.
• Participate in our on-call rotation.

• Deep expertise in operating, scaling, and enhancing Kubernetes clusters or similar resource/container orchestration system.
• Experience developing in Go, Rust, or similar languages to develop custom infrastructure components, scheduling, controllers, that apply business logic to resource management.
• Comfort going broad and deep in a complex systems, making tradeoffs to improve performance and efficiency without sacrificing reliability.
• Strong experience designing, debugging, and operating distributed systems.
• Experience planning and executing rapid, high-risk upgrades, changes with minimal downtime to user services.

• Experience optimizing the performance of node, pod, and container spin-up times.
• Familiarity with eBPF, Linux kernel internals, resource management.
• Comfort securing and isolating workloads in multi-tenant execution environments.

• 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.
• Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.
• 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent.

• Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.
• Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.
• Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.
• Continuous learning benefits & related support. This position is generally not eligible for new visa sponsorship.

• Show mastery of cloud‑native tooling: In your resume and any code samples, highlight hands‑on experience with Docker, Kubernetes (or similar orchestration), Terraform/Pulumi, and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, CircleCI). Include a brief note on how you used these tools to achieve persistent compute and autoscaling for a production service—Render’s core platform features.
• Build a mini “Render‑style” project: Deploy a small full‑stack app (e.g., a FastAPI backend + React front‑end) on a public cloud using persistent containers, dynamic autoscaling, and built‑in observability (Prometheus/Grafana or OpenTelemetry). Publish the repo and a live demo link; reference it in your cover letter as proof you can deliver the developer‑first experience Render sells.
• Demonstrate performance‑focused engineering: Prepare a concise case study (1–2 pages) describing a time you profiled and optimized a compute‑intensive workload (e.g., GPU‑accelerated inference, batch processing pipeline). Emphasize metrics you improved (latency, cost, scaling latency) and the tools used (profilers, load testing, cost dashboards). Interviewers will probe for this mindset.
• Speak the language of reliability: Be ready to discuss how you design fault‑tolerant services—circuit breakers, health checks, graceful degradation, and observability alerts. Cite specific libraries (e.g., Hystrix, Resilience4j, OpenTelemetry) and how you integrated them into a service that needed “always‑on” uptime, mirroring Render’s promise of reliable infrastructure.
• Negotiate with data on remote market rates: Research current U.S. remote compensation for senior software engineers in compute infrastructure (e.g., levels at Stripe, AWS, and comparable SaaS). Prepare a salary range backed by Glassdoor/Levels.fyi data and align it with Render’s equity model. When you receive an offer, reference your proven cost‑saving projects (e.g., “Reduced cloud spend by 30% on X project”) to justify the higher end of your range.