Contract Infrastructure Software Engineer Jobs in Elizabeth, NJ

Lightning AI is seeking a Senior Infrastructure Software Engineer to join our Infrastructure Engineering team.

Our Infrastructure Engineering team builds the software systems that operate and manage Lightning AI's large-scale GPU and bare-metal infrastructure. We develop services, APIs, tooling, and automation that bridge the gap between our physical infrastructure and the systems our customers depend on for AI/ML training, inference, and HPC workloads.

In this role, you will build production software and automation that support infrastructure throughout its lifecycle, from provisioning and bring-up through monitoring, maintenance, and decommissioning. You will design systems that enable engineers and software to interact programmatically with thousands of servers, storage systems, and high-performance networks, reducing manual operations and making infrastructure management more reliable, repeatable, and scalable.

This is a software-first infrastructure role that combines strong software engineering with Linux systems and hardware-aware infrastructure automation. You will work closely with teams across Infrastructure, Networking, Data Center Operations, and Platform Engineering to bring new capacity online and continuously improve how we operate our infrastructure at scale.

This role is based in one of our hubs (NYC, SF, Seattle, or London), with a minimum of 2 in-office days per week and occasional team and company offsites. We are not able to provide visa sponsorship for this position at this time.

• Design, build, and operate production services, APIs, tooling, and automation for managing large-scale bare-metal and GPU infrastructure
• Build and extend software systems that support infrastructure provisioning, configuration, monitoring, and lifecycle management
• Develop reliable automation that reduces manual operational work and improves the consistency and scalability of infrastructure management
• Build tools and interfaces that enable engineers and other systems to interact programmatically with physical infrastructure

• Build and extend systems for server discovery, provisioning, configuration, validation, and lifecycle management
• Automate infrastructure bring-up and capacity deployment across large fleets of compute systems
• Integrate software and automation with hardware management and provisioning systems
• Improve tooling and workflows for managing infrastructure throughout its production lifecycle

• Build telemetry, logging, and observability capabilities that provide visibility into the health of our infrastructure
• Develop tools and automation to identify, diagnose, and respond to infrastructure and hardware issues
• Translate recurring operational issues and hardware failure modes into improvements to software, tooling, and automation
• Improve the reliability and scalability of infrastructure operations as the fleet grows

• Partner with Network, Infrastructure Operations, Data Center, Platform Engineering, and other teams to define requirements and build new infrastructure capabilities
• Participate in architectural discussions and help define the technical direction of Lightning AI's infrastructure software
• Make pragmatic design decisions that balance reliability, scalability, simplicity, and speed of execution
• Write clear design documents and technical documentation and contribute to engineering best practices

• 8+ years of professional software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or related experience
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production backend systems in Python or similar object-oriented programming languages
• Strong experience with Linux in production environments
• Experience building APIs, tooling, or automation for managing infrastructure at scale
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration concepts
• Understanding of HPC and bare-metal infrastructure fundamentals, including provisioning and out-of-band management
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and make pragmatic architecture decisions while building for long-term reliability and scale
• Experience working in a startup or other fast-paced environment with a high degree of ownership and autonomy

• Experience with bare-metal hardware troubleshooting and provisioning, including technologies such as PXE/iPXE, BMC, Redfish, or IPMI, particularly with Dell hardware
• Experience with GPU servers, either in bare-metal environments or under virtualization
• Experience with network switches, routers, and firewalls, particularly SONiC switches, Palo Alto firewalls, or Juniper Networks
• Experience with high-performance storage systems, particularly VAST
• Experience supporting AI/ML or HPC infrastructure at scale