Software Engineer, Self-Hosted Platform

About Firebolt

Firebolt is the Cloud Data Warehouse designed to handle the speed, scale, and flexibility of AI applications. By delivering ultra-low latency, high concurrency, multi-dimensional elasticity, and flexibility, Firebolt empowers organizations to build data-intensive AI applications that perform at scale. With over $270m in funding to date, a strong engineering team and highly experienced leadership, Firebolt is well positioned to revolutionize the AI data infrastructure space and help businesses unlock the full potential of their data.

About the team

We are the Firebolt Engines team, responsible for the production experience of our core Engines. We build and manage the orchestration layer that provisions, scales, and operates our bespoke Query Engine, enabling customers to execute queries.

You will be joining as a founding member on our new Self-Hosted Platform team, a specialized group within the broader Engines organization. This team has a critical mission: to adapt and deploy our core Engine technology for customers in complex, on-premise, and air-gapped environments. This role combines the high-impact, cross-functional collaboration of the Engines team with the unique challenge of bringing Firebolt to a new class of enterprise customers.

About the role

We are seeking a founding Senior or Staff Software Engineer to be the first individual contributor on our new Self-Hosted Platform team. This is a unique opportunity for a standout senior engineer eager to step into leadership, or a new manager who wants to maintain a strong, hands-on connection to the technology. This is a rare opportunity to be the technical cornerstone for a strategic new initiative. You will be the team's subject matter expert for air-gapped and on-premise deployments, pioneering the architecture and setting the technical standard for how Firebolt operates in customer-controlled environments.

You will partner closely with the team's new Technical Lead Manager to shape the technical vision, complementing their leadership with your deep, hands-on expertise in complex infrastructure. You will be empowered to make critical design decisions, write foundational code, and mentor future team members through your expertise.

About the day to day

• Act as the lead hands-on engineer, designing, coding, and shipping the core components required to package, deliver, and maintain Firebolt in customer environments.
• Partner with your Technical Lead Manager and GTM to define the technical roadmap and architecture for Firebolt's on-premise offerings.
• Make deep, cross-cutting changes in the Firebolt codebase (Go, C++, etc.) to adapt our cloud-native services for on-premise reliability, scalability, and security.
• Design and implement the infrastructure, tooling, and automation for packaging, distribution, and upgrades in environments with limited or no connectivity.
• Serve as the ultimate technical escalation point for complex customer incidents, debugging challenging issues across networking, infrastructure, and application layers.
• Establish and champion operational best practices for supporting on-premise customers.
• Mentor future engineers by example, through high-quality code, clear design documentation, and thoughtful code reviews.

Requirements

• Extensive, hands-on experience designing, deploying, and operating complex software in customer-managed on-premise and fully air-gapped environments.
• Deep, production-level experience with Kubernetes and its ecosystem. You must be an expert in deploying and managing applications in complex, non-cloud environments.
• Proven experience as a professional developer of production software, with a willingness to make cross-cutting changes in the Firebolt codebase regardless of language. Development experience in Go or C++ is a strong plus.
• Experience building and operating highly concurrent, highly available, and fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• A strong understanding of networking, network protocols, and security considerations, particularly in restricted environments.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience as a founding or early engineer, comfortable with ambiguity and setting technical direction from scratch.
• A deep understanding of application and infrastructure security in locked-down environments (e.g., certificate management, vulnerability scanning, secure supply chains).
• Deep Linux systems engineering knowledge and advanced networking skills (e.g., proxies, firewalls, VPCs, private endpoints).
• Experience designing and implementing robust monitoring and observability for on-premise systems where data exfiltration is not possible.
• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines like GitHub Actions.
• Experience with technologies like Argo CD, Crossplane, Terraform, FoundationDB, Kafka, and building Kubernetes operators.