Engineering Tech Lead; vMetal

As an Engineering Tech Lead on vMetal at vCluster Labs, you aren’t just running servers; you are the person who turns a rack of bare metal into a programmable platform. In this role, you will lead the engineering work behind vMetal, the systems that discover, provision, configure, and manage physical hardware so our customers can spin up tenant clusters on top of it.

You will sit at the rare intersection of out-of-band server management and modern Go services, and you will set the technical bar as we grow the team. You will report to the VP of Engineering while we build out the team around you.

• vMetal Platform Leadership: Own the technical direction of vMetal. You will lead architecture decisions, drive the roadmap for bare metal provisioning and lifecycle management, and set the standard for code review and design quality on the team.

• Bare Metal Programmability: Build the Go services that turn raw hardware into APIs our customers can consume. You will design and ship the systems that drive Redfish, IPMI, and PXE workflows in production, not glue scripts, real services with clean interfaces and solid tests.

• Hardware Lifecycle Automation: Own how servers get discovered, inventoried, provisioned, configured, and reclaimed. You will eliminate manual intervention from the day-2 path and design for hardware that fails in surprising ways.

• Cross-Generational Architecture: Translate between traditional out-of-band server management and modern Kubernetes-native patterns. You will decide where the abstractions live and how vMetal exposes hardware to tenant clusters cleanly.

• Technical Mentorship & Hiring: Help grow the vMetal team. You will set the technical bar in interviews, partner with Fabian and Joseph on the loop, and mentor engineers as they ramp on bare metal-specific concepts.

• Customer-Driven Reliability: Partner with customer engineering and the broader platform team to debug, harden, and ship against real production workloads. You will be on-call for the systems you build and you will treat reliability as a first-class deliverable.

• Go Fluency: You write production Go for a living. You can design clean services, APIs, and libraries, not just script around someone else’s code.

• Bare Metal Operations Depth: You have shipped systems that drive servers via Redfish and IPMI in production, and you understand PXE boot end-to-end. You have debugged what happens when a BMC lies to you.

• Bare‑Metal-as-a-Service Background: You have built or operated bare‑metal‑as‑a‑service offerings, an AI Cloud, or a hyperscaler bare metal team where infrastructure was the product.

• Bridging Generations: You hold both server management and modern API design in your head and can design between them. You are comfortable in IPMI, iDRAC, and ILO consoles, and equally comfortable shipping a Go controller.

• Technical Leadership: You have led engineers technically, through architecture decisions, code review, and hands‑on mentorship, even if you have not formally managed people. You want to be the technical anchor of a team.

• Operator’s Instinct: You think about failure modes, telemetry, and recoverability before you ship. You have been on‑call for the systems you have built and you treat that as a feature, not a tax.

• Kubernetes Fluency: Comfort with Kubernetes internals, controllers, or operators — enough to design how bare metal hosts integrate cleanly with tenant clusters.

• AI Cloud / Hyperscaler Time: Production experience inside an AI Cloud, hyperscaler, or large platform team where bare metal scale was non‑negotiable.

• Open Source Contributions: Meaningful contributions to projects in the bare metal, provisioning, or Kubernetes ecosystem, e.g., Tinkerbell, Metal3, Cluster API, Ironic.

• Career Pathing: Interest in eventually growing into an Engineering Manager or Architect path as the team scales.

We are a venture‑backed tech startup and the company pioneering Kubernetes virtualization for the AI era. We raised +$30M from top‑tier VCs such as Khosla Ventures (first investor in OpenAI, Git Lab, Stripe,…