January 8, 2026
K8s, GPUs & Bay Area blues
Tamarind Bio (YC W24) Is Hiring Infrastructure Engineers
Bio‑AI startup seeks SF infra wizard; comments melt down over 5‑day office and no salary
TLDR: Tamarind Bio is hiring a SF-based infrastructure engineer to scale 150+ AI drug models, with a 5-day in-office rule. Comments are split: excited by the mission but roasting the onsite demand, missing salary info, and Kubernetes babysitting—highlighting the tension between real-world lab ops and modern remote tech culture.
Tamarind Bio, a Y Combinator (startup accelerator) W24 company, posted a listing: an Infrastructure Engineer to scale 150+ AI models for drug discovery. Translation: keep the machines humming so scientists can design new medicines. The post says Kubernetes (software that wrangles apps in little boxes), cloud, and lots of GPUs. Job link.
Commenters ran to the thread and immediately pounced on the SF Bay Area, 5 days onsite line. One camp called it “back to 2010,” another defended in-person for tricky bio‑AI ops. Then came the comp transparency fight: salary wasn’t listed, and the crowd lit up with “post numbers or pass.”
Infra nerds threw shade at the buzzwords: 'orders of magnitude' and 'Kubernetes' sparked the classic 'are we scaling science or babysitting clusters?' debate. GPU memes flew—'bring your own GPU' jokes, and warnings about cloud bills bigger than pharma budgets. And yes, everyone asked what the stack really looks like.
Amid the chaos, a pro‑mission chorus cheered the impact: making drug design accessible to thousands of scientists is cool, plus YC profile. But the line that 'AI models are eclipsing physics-based tools' triggered spit‑takes—some called it marketing, others said results are real. The vibe: exciting job, spicy culture war.
Key Points
- •Tamarind Bio is hiring an Infrastructure Engineer to scale its ML inference platform serving 150+ biological models.
- •The role focuses on designing, maintaining, and scaling high-availability model serving infrastructure using Kubernetes.
- •Candidates need programming/automation skills, containerization/orchestration experience, and knowledge of AWS/GCP/Azure.
- •Preferred skills include scaling production systems, Kubernetes, Terraform/Pulumi, monitoring/observability, and GPU workloads.
- •The position is onsite in the San Francisco Bay Area; Tamarind Bio serves thousands of scientists in AI-driven drug discovery.