Sr. Staff Engineer, DevOps Platform

Sr. Staff Engineer, DevOps Platform

Location: San Jose, CA (on-site)

Ayar Labs is shattering AI data bottlenecks by moving data at the speed of light. As pioneers of co-packaged optics (CPO), we are using light instead of electricity to move data faster, further, and with a fraction of the energy needed to fuel the explosive growth of AI models.

Backed by industry giants like NVIDIA, AMD, MediaTek and Intel, and manufactured in partnership with the world’s leading semiconductor ecosystem, Ayar Labs’ co-packaged optics solution is key to unleashing next-generation AI scale-up architectures.

Reporting to the Head of the Data Pillar, the Sr. Staff DevOps Platform Engineer owns the internal platforms that power our data and engineering teams. In this role, you’ll improve developer productivity, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence across our infrastructure, deployment systems, observability stack, and cloud-native services.

You will build the foundational systems — cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and our data and compute platform — that let engineers across silicon, photonics, firmware, and software move quickly and reliably. You should be comfortable owning systems end to end, from architecture through on-call.

What You'll Achieve

• Cloud infrastructure: Design, build, and operate cloud infrastructure (mostly AWS) with everything defined as code using IaC tooling.
• Build & Operate the Container Platform: Design and run Kubernetes clusters and the surrounding networking, security, and storage layers that workloads depend on.
• Automate the Path to Production: Build and own CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation that let engineers ship safely and frequently, with GitOps-style workflows and repeatable, auditable releases.
• Own Reliability & Security: Implement least-privilege IAM and guardrails, define and uphold SLAs, instrument end-to-end observability, and lead on-call and incident response — for both the platform and the data flowing through it.
• Drive Efficiency & Self-Serve: Optimize cloud spend and deliver self-service paved-road tooling and environments that let our teams provision and ship safely with low overhead.
• Observability & reliability: Improve observability through metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, alerts, and incident response practices.
• Data & compute platforms: Contribute and collaborate on the development of our Python-based data and compute platforms. Data asset pipelines, HPC, ML. and large-scale simulation.
• Leading & mentoring: Establish and champion best practices for reliability, security, cost efficiency, and infrastructure governance. Mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar through reviews, documentation, and shared standards

Required Skills

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Minimum of 5+ years across platform/cloud infrastructure and/or data engineering, with a track record of building and operating production cloud platforms.
• Deep hands-on experience across core AWS services — IAM, VPC and networking, S3, EC2/ECS/EKS, Lambda, CloudWatch, and managed databases (RDS).
• Strong proficiency with Terraform/OpenTofu — reusable modules, state management at scale, and sound code structure (CloudFormation a plus).
• Production Kubernetes experience (EKS preferred — Helm, networking, RBAC) and experience designing CI/CD pipelines (Gitlab); GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD or Flux a plus.
• Hands-on with monitoring/observability tooling such as Datadog, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, and PagerDuty, plus experience defining SLAs and managing cost.
• Python and SQL skills, as well as experience with cloud data platforms and databases
• A passion for building scalable, well-documented platform and data solutions that have a measurable impact; interest in applying AI tools and modern approaches to infrastructure and data problems.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills — you can write a clear status update, design proposal, or post-mortem that people actually read — and work effectively in a team environment.
• Strong decision-making, technical versatility, and problem-resolution skills. HashiCorp (Terraform Associate) or AWS certifications are a plus.

NOTE TO RECRUITERS: Principals only. We are not accepting resumes from recruiters for this position. Remuneration for recruiting activities is only applicable subject to a signed and executed agreement between the parties. Please don't send candidates to Ayar Labs, and do not contact our managers.

Compensation & Benefits

The base salary range for this role is $150,000 - $180,000, depending on experience, skills, and qualifications. In addition to base pay, Ayar Labs offers meaningful equity (new-hire stock options plus an evergreen program), a 401(k) with immediate-vesting employer match, premium medical/dental/vision coverage (100% paid for employees, 75% for dependents), twelve weeks of paid parental leave, daily lunch, and more.

About Ayar Labs

At Ayar Labs we're about to revolutionize computing by moving data with light. We're unleashing processing power for artificial intelligence, high performance computing, cloud and telecommunications by removing the bottlenecks created by today's electrical I/O - making it possible to continue scaling computing system performance.

Ayar Labs is the first to deliver an optical I/O solution that combines in-package optical I/O chiplets and multi-wavelength remote light sources to replace traditional electrical I/O. This silicon photonics-based I/O solution enables chips to communicate with each other from millimeters to kilometers, to deliver orders of magnitude improvements in latency, bandwidth density, and power consumption.

With our strong collaborations with industry leaders and government, our deep ties to MIT and UC Berkeley, and our commitment to hiring the best engineers in photonics and electronics, joining our team gives you the opportunity to collaborate with renowned experts on challenging, paradigm-shifting work.

We are passionate about delivering in-package optical I/O at scale, leveraging the strength of our patent portfolio and our team of leading interdisciplinary experts. We believe that deep cross-collaboration between teams facilitated by honest, open debate is the best way to drive innovation and achieve big wins. Join our team and experience the possibilities.

Ayar Labs is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is strongly committed to all policies which will afford equal opportunity employment to all qualified persons without regard to age, sex, national origin, race, color, ethnicity, creed, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

It is the policy of Ayar Labs to provide reasonable accommodation when requested by a qualified applicant or employee with a disability, unless such accommodation would cause an undue hardship. Veterans are more than welcome and encouraged to apply.