Staff Software Engineer, Compute

About the team + role

We are building an elite team, applying frontier technologies to the world’s biggest financial problems. We’re looking for bold thinkers. Sharp problem-solvers. Builders who are wired to make an impact. Robinhood isn’t a place for complacency, it’s where ambitious people do the best work of their careers. We’re a high-performing, fast-moving team with ethics at the center of everything we do. Expectations are high, and so are the rewards.

As Robinhood’s infrastructure engineering, we are on a mission to provide Robinhood product teams a world-class platform that enables rapid product development by making infrastructure invisible and highly available.

The mission of Software Platform, of which Compute is a part, is to accelerate developer velocity and increase system reliability by building the foundational software platforms and tools that power the rest of Robinhood engineering.

The Compute team at Robinhood is solely responsible for building a highly available, horizontally scalable, secure, best in the industry (for Robinhood scale) offering of Kubernetes-powered container provisioning APIs that seamlessly integrate with the rest of infrastructure and platform offerings from other teams. This team’s primary focus is to proactively ensure scalability, reliability and availability of our Kubernetes distribution. This includes the deployment topology and configuration of the OSS components we build upon and all the extensions we build.

The Compute team is the key contributor for enabling a multi-region future for Robinhood’s platform and infrastructure services. This helps the platform services scale without adding additional complexity to our application developers. APIs and systems managed by this team are also responsible for transparent platform integrations (sidecars, daemonsets) that offer core capabilities (Auth, Security, DNS, Load Balancing, Storage) offered to the tenants (applications) making this an area of huge importance to the overall safety and reliability of Robinhood and its value to be a safety-first company.

This role is based in our Toronto office(s), with in-person attendance expected at least 3 days per week.

At Robinhood, we believe in the power of in-person work to accelerate progress, spark innovation, and strengthen community. Our office experience is intentional, energizing, and designed to fully support high-performing teams.

What you’ll do

• Design large scale systems within the team, making the right tradeoffs for risk and long-term maintainability.
• Proactively identify and drive optimizations and improvements to the infrastructure and systems.
• Set up and drive technical directions of the project while mentor and up-level junior engineers in the team.
• Lead organization-wide collaboration for the team.
• Contribute to open source projects.

What you bring

• Expert knowledge of Kubernetes control plane and data plane components.
• Thorough understanding of the Kubernetes Platform and container lifecycle management.
• Experience with Kubernetes multi-cluster challenges and Kubernetes networking (e.g. CNI deployment and troubleshooting).
• Experience managing and debugging large scale infrastructure services in production.
• Proven seasoned individual contributor with experience planning and leading end to end large projects with long-term impact on one or more systems or a team.
• Have a passion for mentoring junior engineers and improving engineering craftsmanship.
• Open source contributions to Kubernetes and other related projects.
• Prior experience scaling the Kubernetes platform at high-growth startups.
• Experience designing and managing other distributed systems at scale.

What we offer

• Challenging, high-impact work to grow your career
• Performance driven compensation with multipliers for outsized impact, bonus programs, and equity ownership
• Top tier benefits to fuel your work, including supplemental health insurance, ancillary insurance, and mental health support programs
• Lifestyle wallet - a highly flexible employer-paid benefits spending account expenses beyond traditional benefits such as wellness, childcare, learning, and more.
• Time off to recharge including company holidays, paid time off, sick time, paid volunteer time off, parental leave, and more!
• Exceptional office experience with catered meals, events, and comfortable workspaces.
• Monthly commuter stipend to help offset in-office commuting costs

Our team is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming interview experience for all candidates. If you require a specific accommodation during the application or interview process due to a physical or mental condition, please complete this Applicant Accommodation Form to notify our team. The form should only be completed if you need a specific accommodation.

AI Usage Disclosure: Robinhood uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of our recruiting process. These tools enhance the efficiency and consistency of our hiring process; however, all hiring decisions are made by our hiring teams.

Vacancy Notice: This job posting represents an existing vacancy that we are actively seeking to fill.