Jupiter Volta Inc.

Senior Platform Engineer

Platform, Infrastructure & Reliability (Hybrid Cloud / On-Prem)

About the role:

Jupiter Volta is a fast-based startup based in Berkeley, California that is developing fusion energy systems and advanced plasma technologies that rely on industrial control hardware, high-performance simulation, and modern software platforms. Our software stack spans on-prem Kubernetes clusters, SCADA systems, Python microservices, React applications, and GPU-accelerated simulation workloads.

We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to help us modernize, stabilize, and scale this platform. This role is about owning production reality: CI/CD, Kubernetes, deployments, reliability, security, database lifecycles, environment management, observability, operational readiness, and helping a small team move fast without breaking critical systems.

You will play a major role in shaping how software is built and shipped across the company.

What you’ll do:

Platform & Infrastructure Ownership:

• Own and improve our Kubernetes-based on-prem infrastructure
• Diagnose, harden, and maintain our Longhorn storage deployment (replication, backups, recovery, performance)
• Design and maintain containerized service deployments using Docker, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD
• Establish safe, repeatable deployment strategies (rolling, blue/green, canary where appropriate)
• Design and manage environment parity across development, staging, and production systems
• Own data durability and recovery strategies for stateful systems, including backup verification and restore testing
• Apply least-privilege access controls and RBAC across infrastructure and services

CI/CD, Testing & SRE Foundations:

• CI/CD, Testing & SRE Foundations
• Design and implement secure CI/CD workflows for automated testing and deployment of our applications
• Establish baseline observability for both infrastructure and application layers
• Define, implement, and document operational processes and procedures such as secrets management, release deployments, and incident responses and postmortems

Application Modernization:

• Architect a well-scoped microservice ecosystem
• Define microservice service boundaries, APIs, versioning, and shared tooling
• Partner closely with backend engineers to ensure clean, production-ready integration and decomposition of any monoliths

Technical Leadership:

• Raise the bar on:
• Code quality
• Testing discipline
• Production awareness
• Modern architecture and development best practices
• Help the team balance development velocity and research flexibility with production reliability

What we’re looking for:

Required experience:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time running production systems
• Strong experience with:
• Kubernetes (ideally including on-prem or hybrid deployments)
• Docker and containerized services
• CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.)
• Strong backend engineering background (Python preferred)
• Comfort working across infrastructure and application layers
• Experience being “on the hook” for uptime, deploys, and failures

Strongly preferred:

• Experience with stateful workloads in Kubernetes (databases, storage systems, Longhorn, etc.)
• Experience introducing SRE practices into teams without prior production maturity
• Exposure to:
• On-prem networking
• Self-managed security
• Industrial, embedded, or hardware-adjacent systems
• Experience owning production incidents and improving system reliability over time
• Familiarity with security best practices for containerized and Kubernetes-based systems
• Strong opinions about operational simplicity, debuggability, and long-term maintainability

Nice to have:

• React or modern front-end deployment experience
• Familiarity with SCADA systems, PLCs, MQTT, or industrial control environments
• Experience supporting scientific computing or simulation-heavy teams

Why this role is special:

• You’ll help define the technical foundation of a fusion energy company at a critical growth stage
• You’ll work on systems that bridge real hardware, real physics, and real production software
• You’ll have genuine influence over architecture, tooling, and engineering culture
• You’ll solve problems most engineers never get to touch

We are looking for a self-directed engineer with a pragmatic, systems-focused mindset who can take ownership of complex problems and make steady progress toward ambitious goals using strong engineering fundamentals. This role is ideal for someone drawn to mission-driven technical challenges and excited to build foundational systems in a culture that values rigor, curiosity, and impact. You will have meaningful ownership, accelerated growth, and the chance to shape critical infrastructure at a fast-growing startup entering a major technical inflection point.

Jupiter Volta is an early stage startup. Compensation will include generous equity and be awarded based on experience. Work location is mostly on-site in Berkeley, California, with occasional remote work days.

Pay: $135,000.00 - $150,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Paid time off

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Berkeley, CA