ABOUT THIS JOB

As a Principal Engineer at Opaque Systems, you will play a critical role in shaping the architecture and driving the technical direction of the core OPAQUE platform, with a focus on the confidential computing infrastructure. You’ll collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to design, develop, and scale solutions for confidential AI. This is an opportunity to solve complex technical challenges while making a significant impact on the development of next-generation technologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, architecture, and implementation of core software components for Opaque’s confidential computing platform
• Design, implement, and maintain end-to-end attestation services and infrastructure
• Lead integration of TEE technologies (CNCF CoCo, hyperscaler CC offerings) with OPAQUE's platform
• Design and operate multi-cloud CC deployments at the Kubernetes platform layer — runtime classes, TEE node pools, custom admission controllers, and service mesh security for confidential workloads
• Define and enforce cryptographic standards: key derivation, signing schemes, secure channel establishment, and secrets management within TEE boundaries
• Drive code quality and security review standards across the security engineering team — review at the correctness and side-channel level, not just design
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and AI teams to deliver scalable, high-performance, and secure solutions.
• Drive technical excellence across the engineering team, setting best practices for coding, architecture, testing, and deployment.
• Mentor and guide junior engineers, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and technical innovation.
• Work closely with stakeholders to define technical requirements and ensure alignment with business objectives.
• Optimize system performance, scalability, and fault tolerance while ensuring the security and privacy of data in all phases of computation.
• Stay ahead of industry trends and advancements in confidential AI and confidential computing
• Act as a key decision-maker in technical strategies, contributing to both tactical and strategic goals.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a focus on distributed systems, cloud computing, or security.
• Deep hands-on experience in confidential computing / TEE technologies (e.g., CNCF CoCo)
• Fluency in attestation protocols: attestation quote generation and verification, RATS (RFC 9334), EAT/EAR standards
• Systems programming at production scale in Go and/or Rust; kernel modules, ioctl interfaces, or TEE SDK integration code a strong plus
• Cloud-native platform depth — Kubernetes operators, custom admission controllers, runtime classes, and TEE workload orchestration across multiple clouds
• Cryptographic engineering fundamentals: key hierarchies, AEAD schemes, digital signatures, and the ability to reason about threat models at the hardware boundary
• Expertise in system architecture and design, with a strong understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, and performance optimization.
• Proven track record of delivering large-scale, high-performance, and secure software systems.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across technical and non-technical teams.
• Bonus: Track record of open-source contribution or standards engagement: CNCF CoCo, Project Oak, IETF RATS, or equivalent

Overview

We are seeking an exceptionally technical and hands-on Sr Engineering Managerto lead our Infrastructure Foundation team. This role is ideal for a senior engineer who has scaled systems in production, built resilient infrastructure platforms, and has a proven track record of managing and mentoring engineers. You will drive strategy, architecture, and execution for our infrastructure and developer tooling, ensuring our systems are reliable, secure, and efficient at scale. The role is highly technical and requires hands-on experience in Azure, GCP or AWS and has fundamental requirements in understanding networking architectures, Kubernetes, Docker, agile, automated testing for infrastructure and team leadership.  You will lead a team of devops and platform engineers focused on kubernetes, confidential compute, cloud and building infrastructure as code platform as a primary responsibility. 

Key Responsibilities

• Leadership & Management
  
  
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of infrastructure, DevOps engineers focused on platform components based on Kubernetes
  
  
• Balance technical leadership with people management: conduct 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development planning.
  
  
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product Growth teams, leadership, and Engineering teams to ensure alignment on foundation priorities in a dynamically  changing startup environment.
  
  
• Infrastructure & Operations
  
  
• Own the design, implementation, and maintenance of cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure) and build for scale, resilience and security
  
  
• Ensure scalability, availability, and performance of systems across distributed, mission-critical environments for production, development and sandbox environments
  
  
• Drive automation initiatives to eliminate toil and improve efficiency in infrastructure and developer workflows.
  
  
• Oversee on-call operations, incident response, and root cause analysis, improving mean time to recovery (MTTR) and drive to key KPIs ( DORA or similar)
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• Manage cloud costs and drive architectures to manage and maintain cloud costs
  
  
• DevOps & Platform Engineering
  
  
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines to accelerate development velocity while ensuring security and compliance.
  
  
• Develop and enforce Infrastructure-as-Code practices (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Helm and Azure marketplace automation and deployments).
  
  
• Drive observability: logging, monitoring, metrics, tracing, and alerting best practices.
  
  
• Understanding of security considerations in AWS,Azure,GCP and partner with Security to harden infrastructure and implement compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA, etc.).
  
  
• Technical Strategy & Execution
  
  
• Define long-term infrastructure strategy for scalability and cost optimization.
  
  
• Introduce and evaluate emerging technologies, tools, and methodologies to continuously improve infra systems.
  
  
• Lead large-scale migration projects (e.g., monolith to microservices, IaC, Kubernetes secure image production and networking architectures).
  
  

Qualifications

• Experience
  
  
  • 10+ years of experience in Enterprise level SaaS,  Infrastructure, or DevOps roles, with at least 7+ years leading technical teams in a hands on capacity
  • Proven track record managing infrastructure at scale (multi-region, high-traffic, high-availability systems).
  • Deep hands-on expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Kubernetes, containerization, and orchestration with deep understanding on how they work technically
  • Strong background in CI,Github actions, automation frameworks, and developer productivity tooling.
  • Strong understanding of distributed systems in production based on Kubernetes deployments 
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• Technical Skills
  
  
  • Deep cloud experience in GCP, Azure or AWS ( GCP preferred )
  • Deep technical expertise  in Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g Terraform, Helm or similar)  cloud services
  • Strong coding ability in Python, Go or similar
  • Expertise with monitoring/observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry).
  • Knowledge of databases (SQL/NoSQL), caching systems, and data pipelines from an infra perspective.
  • Familiar with compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO, HIPAA, PCI).
    
    
• Leadership Skills
  
  
  • Demonstrated ability to lead by example and remain hands-on while guiding a team.
  • Skilled at balancing business goals with technical excellence.
  • Solid experience with JIRA and agile targeted towards infrastructure/foundation teams
  • Experience recruiting, hiring, and retaining world-class engineers.

• Must be Able to:
  • Come into the San Francisco office 2-3 days per week

Nice-to-Haves

• Prior experience in startups or hyper-growth environments and confidential computing platforms a huge plus
• Background in security and GenAI  products, workflow related products and infrastructures supporting these products
• Contributions to open-source infra/devops projects.
• Experience with multi-cloud strategies or hybrid cloud environments including client side deployments.