The Principal Architect will design scalable cloud infrastructure, oversee AI service provisioning, and optimize data pipelines using Kubernetes and Azure technologies, mentoring teams in best practices.
Aera Technology is a pioneer in the growing category of Decision Intelligence – the technology to digitize, augment, and automate decision-making processes with AI and machine learning. Through our AI decision automation platform, Aera Decision Cloud™, we are helping the best-known brands in the world make smarter, faster decisions.
Privately-held and VC-funded, we have a global team of over 400 Aeranauts – and we’re growing. We deliver Decision Intelligence innovation and services that enable enterprises to automate and scale decision making with accuracy and speed. We continue to be the trusted choice of market leaders for our proven ability to generate value and unlock opportunities that were previously unattainable.
As a Principal Architect, you will play a crucial role in developing the multi-cloud infrastructure to ensure the scalability, reliability, and security of our systems. You will work closely with cross-functional teams to drive innovation, streamline operations, and optimize our platform for performance and efficiency.
Responsibilities
- Architect and scale enterprise-grade AKS clusters built for high concurrency, performance, and real-time AI inference, ensuring the platform is globally distributed and highly available.
- Leverage Crossplane for Kubernetes-native provisioning of Azure services, creating a Kubernetes-native control plane for rapid scaling of AI services.
- Champion GitOps practices with Argo CD to standardize deployments across multiple environments and regions, enabling reliable, automated delivery of mission-critical SaaS workloads.
- Engineer infrastructure that supports data-intensive AI/ML pipelines, integrating compute, storage, and messaging with Kubernetes to power real-time decision intelligence use cases.
- Optimize scalability and concurrency with autoscaling, pod disruption budgets, and advanced workload scheduling, ensuring millions of daily requests are served with low latency.
- Develop and maintain automation, tooling, and integrations using Python, Ruby, and Terraform, enabling teams to scale infrastructure and AI services efficiently.
- Design and enforce secure, compliant, multi-tenant architectures with Azure AD SSO, managed identities, RBAC, and Key Vault integration.
- Build resilient networking topologies with VNets, VNet peering, Private Link, and service mesh technologies (e.g., Istio, Linkerd) and emissary ingress for advanced security and reliability.
- Integrate observability frameworks at scale using Prometheus, Grafana, Azure Monitor, and OpenTelemetry, providing deep visibility into performance, availability, and latency.
- Collaborate closely with AI/ML engineering teams to align infrastructure with real-time inference and streaming data requirements, enabling cutting-edge decision automation.
- Mentor engineering and operations teams while documenting and evangelizing Kubernetes-native and Azure-native best practices, driving innovation across the organization.
About You
- 10+ years of cloud infrastructure experience with expert-level skills in Kubernetes and Azure.
- Proven experience designing and operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms where performance, scalability, and security are critical.
- Hands-on expertise with Crossplane for Kubernetes-controlled Azure service provisioning.
- Deep familiarity with Azure services: AKS, AzureFlexible MySQL, Blob Storage, Event Hubs, Key Vault, etc.
- Strong coding and automation background with Github Actions, Python, and Terraform, plus experience with other high-level programming and scripting languages.
- Skilled in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Crossplane, Helm) and GitOps (Argo CD).
- In-depth knowledge of Kubernetes networking, autoscaling, and workload orchestration for AI/ML inference workloads.
- Proficiency with observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, Azure Monitor, and OpenTelemetry.
- A collaborative leader who thrives on mentoring and enabling teams, with excellent communication and documentation skills.
- Motivated to build the core infrastructure behind AI-powered decision intelligence at global scale, driving meaningful impact for some of the world’s most recognized brands.
Nice to Have
- Background with large-scale, real-time data streaming platforms.
- Prior collaboration on AI/ML infrastructure platforms or decision intelligence systems.
- Contributions to open-source projects, especially in Kubernetes or the cloud-native ecosystem.
If you share our passion for building a sustainable, intelligent, and efficient world, you’re in the right place. Established in 2017 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, we're a series C start-up, with teams in Mountain View, San Francisco (California), Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Paris (France), Munich (Germany), London (UK), Pune (India), and Sydney (Australia). So join us, and let’s build this!
Aera Technology is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Aera Technology will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Aera Technology respects the privacy of your data. Please take the time to read our European GDPR privacy candidate notice available here
Benefits:
At Aera Technology, we strive to support our Aeranauts and their loved ones through different stages of life with a variety of attractive benefits, and great perks. In addition to offering a competitive salary and company stock options, we have other great benefits available. You’ll find comprehensive medical, vision and dental plans, a 401K plan, flexible paid time off, generous parental leave, and much more. We believe in a flexible working environment, to allow our Aeranauts to perform at their best, ensuring a healthy work-life balance. When you’re working from the office, you’ll also have access to a fully-stocked kitchen with a selection of snacks and beverages.
Top Skills
Aks
Argo Cd
Azure
Azure Monitor
Crossplane
Grafana
Helm
Kubernetes
Opentelemetry
Prometheus
Python
Ruby
Terraform
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