Senior Platform Engineer (San Francisco)

At dltHub , we're building on the success of dlt , the most popular open-source library for data loading in Python with over 2 million monthly downloads . After proving its value in the OSS community, were now building dltHub to make data engineering accessible to all Python developers.dltHub is a workspace and runtime that empowers any Python developer to build, run, and maintain data pipelines, transformations, and notebooks, without needing a data platform or infrastructure team.

Our team is based in Berlin , now growing into other locations, especially across the US . Founded by experienced data and ML engineers, we're backed by Foundation Capital , Dig Ventures , and technical founders from Hugging Face , Instana , Matillion , Miro , MotherDuck , Datadog , Mode , and Rasa .

Why we want to hire you

Were building a new service, ground-up, that brings together the dlt library, an LLM-first development workspace, and data-lake storage and runtime for pipelines and notebooks. To make this real at scale, were hiring a Platform Engineer to own the infrastructure, provisioning, and automation layer: multi-cloud Kubernetes, secure networking, storage, identities/secrets, CI/CD, GitOps, and the paved-road tooling that makes all of this simple for our product and data teams. Youll turn complex cloud/K8s plumbing into clean Pythonic automation and self-service.

Youll be part of the CTOs team, working across tech and product. Here are some of the people youll be working with.

Learn more about what youll do

If you're curious about working with us, here are a few things to look into: dltHub Announcement, OSS roadmap, OSS docs and OSS board .

What youll do

• Design, provision, and operate our core platform: multi-env/multi-region Kubernetes clusters; networking, security, and identities ; storage (object store, tables/iceberg/DuckLake), and runtime for Python jobs, notebooks, and services.
• Build code abstractions: Python CLIs/SDKs, templates, and controllers that abstract infra into simple workflows.
• Define IaC standards ( Terraform , Helm) for everything: clusters, apps, policies, and data runtimes.
• Design and implement platform control plane : end user secrets management, cost controls, tenant/resource limits, SSO, and scheduling.
• Ship observability as a product: metrics/logs/traces, golden dashboards, SLIs/SLOs, runbooks, and incident/postmortem practice.
• Youll work intensively with the CTO and software engineers in the team on all of the above.

What makes you a great fit

Must-haves

• 5+ years in Platform/SRE/DevInfra roles (or equivalent impact) building and running production systems.
• Strong Python used for automation/tooling (CLIs, bots, controllers/operators, SDKs).
• Deep Kubernetes experience (cluster ops, Helm/Kustomize, controllers/operators, container networking).
• Practical observability (Prometheus/Grafana/OpenTelemetry or similar), performance tuning, and incident response.

Nice-to-haves

• Running Python data pipelines/apps in production (dlt, dbt, Polars, DuckDB, Iceberg).
• Storage & query engines: Parquet, Iceberg, DuckDB/MotherDuck, BigQuery/Snowflake/Postgres .
• Eventing/streaming (Kafka/Pub/Sub), batch schedulers, or serverless Python runtimes.
• Security & supply-chain hardening (images, SBOMs, policy-as-code, secret rotation).
• OSS contributions or demo-driven platform work you can show us.

Our stack

Heres the stack we use (or plan to use) so you can quickly see if its a good fit for you. Strong Python knowledge is essential. You dont need to know everything listed, but if youre confident in any of the areas below, wed love to hear from you.

• Infra/Platform: Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform/Pulumi, Vault/Secrets Manager, AWS/GCP/Azure, Docker, container registries,
• Observability & Ops: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Loki/ELK, incident tooling, cost monitoring.
• Data runtime & storage: DuckLake, Iceberg, Parquet, object/bucket storage.
• Python & data libs: dlt, dbt, Polars, DuckDB, PyArrow, FastAPI/Starlette; Rust for hot paths.
• Frontend/UI (where needed): Next.js/React, Marimo/Streamlit/Jupyter (Python).

What we offer

In our work culture, we value each others autonomy and efficiency. We have dedicated hours for communication and deep work. We like automation, so we automate our work before we automate the work of others.

• Join a team that takes these values seriously, both in our company culture and in how we build products: we speak with courage, build what matters, automate relentlessly, show up with energy, deliver on commitments, and win together .
• Working from the office: Were opening our San Francisco office, while still giving you plenty of opportunities for deep work and working from home. Dedicated no-meeting days help the team focus on their most impactful work.
• Offsites and team connection: Since most of the team is currently based in Berlin and were just starting to hire in the US, were planning regular offsites and opportunities to work together from our Berlin and San Francisco offices.
• We are deeply committed to your personal and professional growth, and as such, we allocate an annual budget for learning and development .
• We offer an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) for employees, based on their role and level of dedication. We provide an option to increase your ESOP if you grow with us.