Software Engineer - Infrastructure

About Mother Duck

Don’t let the quirky name fool you:
At Mother Duck
, we’re on a mission to make data warehousing fun, frictionless, and ducking awesome for developers and data practitioners building blazing fast internal and customer-facing analytics experiences. We're building a cloud-hosted version of DuckDB, working hand-in-hand with the creators of the fastest-growing and fastest-improving query engine on the planet. Unlike other databases, Mother Duck was architected to unify local development with cloud operations to bridge the gap between software and data engineering workflows.

Our team is a mix of thoughtful, passionate, and empathetic data industry veterans.

We're shaking up assumptions on how data should be done! We empower and delight data practitioners using a novel cloud architecture. We believe in the power of single node databases, built on top of DuckDB, an open source foundation with a vibrant community.

Our engineering team comes from a wide mix of backgrounds… running the gamut from data experts to generalists, from big tech to startups, and SaaS companies to government and finance. But no matter where we've come from, we're passionate, collaborative and customer-focused. We work together as a team from across our engineering hubs in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and Amsterdam.

Mother Duck's infrastructure team builds the systems and tools that make our platform reliable, secure, and easy to operate. We run our platform on Kubernetes, so if you're someone who genuinely enjoys living in K8s… debugging cluster issues, tuning autoscaling, thinking through multi-tenancy and workload isolation… this is a team built for you.

If you're energized by a blend of cloud systems work, software development, and operational strategy, we'd love to hear from you.

This role can be based in our Seattle, San Francisco or New York offices

• Own and evolve our Kubernetes platform, including cluster architecture, upgrades, multi‑tenancy, and workload isolation
• Build and maintain infrastructure components using Go and Python across compute, networking, and storage
• Design and improve CI/CD pipelines that enable safe and fast software delivery
• Implement observability tooling and dashboards that surface system health and improve on‑call effectiveness
• Automate operational workflows, especially around K8s operations, to reduce manual intervention and increase consistency
• Collaborate with product and backend teams to embed operational best practices into product development
• Participate in incident response and ongoing efforts to improve system reliability and security

• Autoscaling our Kubernetes clusters in the EU region and building out private link networking
• Designing secure CI/CD pipelines with observability baked in from the start
• Building logging frameworks that make cross‑system debugging way less painful

• Hands‑on Kubernetes experience… you've operated clusters in production, not just deployed workloads onto them
• Experience working with cloud‑native infrastructure more broadly (AWS, Terraform, service meshes, etc.)
• Programming skills in Go and/or Python, and the ability to design systems that are secure, scalable, and maintainable
• Familiarity with observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, or Open Telemetry
• A real sense of ownership and a pragmatic approach to engineering tradeoffs
• Interest in building internal tools and automation to make development and operations easier for others

• "Their automation saved me hours this week, and I didn’t even have to ask."
• "Our oncall pages are quieter because of the systems they built."
• "They made our CI/CD pipeline so smooth I almost miss the old chaos… almost."
• "Every dashboard they touch actually tells me something useful."
• "Our K8s clusters just work, and when they don’t, they’re already three steps ahead of the fix."

• Feather‑ruffling compensation – competitive salary and stock options so you have a stake in our flock’s success.
• Top‑notch healthcare coverage – 100% paid medical, dental, and vision for employees, plus 80% coverage for…