Location: Santa Clara, CA (5 days/week in office)
Comp: ~$250K–$300K base + equity
Who We Are
Building the Backbone of Distributed Applications.
At Orkes, we are reimagining how developers build reliable, scalable, event-driven applications without wrangling complex infrastructure.
Born from Netflix's battle-tested open-source project, OSS Conductor, our platform is now powering billions of mission critical workflows across fintech, e-commerce, logistics, healthcare, and more.
Our platform powers billions of mission critical workflows across industries like fintech, e-commerce, logistics, and healthcare helping companies run the core operations of their business with confidence. These are the workflows behind every transaction, every delivery, every patient check-in, quietly orchestrating our digital world.
We’re solving some of the hardest infrastructure problems: how do you make distributed systems reliable, observable, and scalable – without every team having to reinvent the wheel? We absorb the complexity of distributed systems, letting teams build with confidence.
We’re hiring a strong engineering leader to own the Cloud & Platform engineering function at Orkes.
This is a high-impact, highly operational role; you’ll lead engineers while staying deeply hands-on in architecture, systems, and production challenges. The primary goal is to drive velocity of engineers on the team.
We are open to:
- A hands-on Tech Lead ready to step into management
- OR a Manager who still codes and operates at a high technical level
- Lead systems responsible for cloud infrastructure, deployments, and platform capabilities
- Support customer environments and production systems at scale
- Drive improvements in reliability, performance, and scalability
- Lead and mentor engineers while contributing technically
- Review architecture, code, and system design
- Potential to grow and manage a larger team over time
- Handle frequent context switching across priorities
- Support high-profile customers and urgent production needs
- Drive velocity while maintaining engineering quality
- Strong background in distributed systems / cloud infrastructure
- Proven experience as a hands-on engineer (recently)
- Experience leading engineers (formal or informal)
- Ability to operate in high-context-switch, fast-moving environments
- Startup experience or large-company experience with understanding of scale
- Managers who have been out of hands-on engineering for too long
- Pure people managers without deep technical credibility
- Engineers who struggle with fast pace or shifting priorities
- Former senior/staff engineer stepping into leadership
- OR current EM who still codes and leads technically
- Someone who has seen both startup and structured scale
Skills Required
- Strong background in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure
- Proven experience as a hands-on engineer
- Experience leading engineers formally or informally
- Ability to operate in high-context-switch, fast-moving environments
- Startup experience or large-company experience with understanding of scale
What We Do
Scale your distributed applications, modernize your workflows for durability, and protect against software failures and downtimes with Orkes, the leading orchestration platform for developers. Orkes Cloud provides fully managed & security hardened clusters offering full compatibility with Open Source Conductor with enterprise features added. Write workflows as code, build task workers, integrate other applications with open source SDKs Scale to the billions, debug in minutes, observe everything Build durable execution flows driven by events Seamlessly weave in Large Language Models, Prompt Templates and Vector Database Integrations into your business workflows. Integrate and optimize human actions into your workflows Orkes is founded by ex-Netflix Engineers, original creators of Netflix Conductor OSS.
