About Nscale
Nscale is taking on the hyperscalers by building a vertically integrated cloud built for AI. We own the data centres, software, and applications that power today's AI stack using sustainable technology solutions. We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency.
As a Nscaler, you'll build trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. Collaboration is key, and we work together swiftly and respectfully, embracing adaptability and resilience in all we do.
Principal Systems Engineer
We are looking for a Principal Systems Engineer, based in Singapore, to lead the architecture, design, and development of the systems software that automates the management of our bare-metal GPU clusters across Asia-Pacific. This is a highly technical leadership role for an engineer who has built bare-metal clouds and wants to apply that experience to AI infrastructure at significant scale.
You will operate at the intersection of systems engineering and back-end software, building scalable, fault-tolerant control-plane services that provision, validate, operate, and remediate thousands of GPU nodes and the fabrics that connect them. You will partner closely with platform, networking, hardware, data centre, and deployment teams across APAC, Europe, and the US.
As a Principal Engineer, you will serve as a technical authority across compute, network, and control-plane domains, setting engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and guiding critical architectural decisions as we build out our APAC systems and network engineering organisation.
What You'll Be Doing
Lead the architecture, design, and development of systems software that automates the full lifecycle of bare-metal GPU infrastructure (1000+ nodes), from rack arrival through production and remediation
Design scalable, fault-tolerant control-plane services for inventory, provisioning, firmware and configuration management, health checking, and automated remediation
Own complex architectural decisions involving scalability, fault tolerance, state management, data consistency, and performance optimisation
Define how hosts are discovered, provisioned, and managed at scale through out-of-band management (BMC, Redfish, IPMI) and automated OS deployment
Define cluster bringup, validation, and acceptance standards across compute, storage, and InfiniBand, RoCE, and Ethernet fabrics
Partner with platform, networking, hardware, data centre, and deployment teams to bring new APAC capacity online predictably and repeatably
Diagnose and resolve complex issues spanning hardware, firmware, kernel, networking, and software layers
Drive operational excellence through automation, observability, and reliability engineering
Establish engineering best practices, design standards, and operational processes for systems software development
Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, acting as a force multiplier across the APAC organisation
Lead technical reviews and guide long-term infrastructure roadmap planning for the region, working across time zones with Europe and the US
About You
Masters/Bachelor Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale production infrastructure
Proven experience building a bare-metal cloud or bare-metal fleet management platform, including provisioning, lifecycle, and remediation automation
Deep expertise in Linux, server hardware architecture, and computer networking
Strong background in distributed systems, including fault tolerance, state management, consistency, and concurrency
Strong proficiency in systems and back-end programming languages such as Go, Python, Rust, or C/C++
Hands-on experience with out-of-band management (BMC, IPMI, Redfish) and automated OS provisioning at scale
Demonstrated…