How Aranya hired a platform engineer in seven weeks

Aranya builds clusterdOS, an open source operating system for clusters. It turns bare metal into production-ready GPU clusters, usually inside 48 hours, and runs on Kubernetes while reaching into VM and Slurm environments.

Christian describes it in bigger terms than a tool. He calls it a data center scale operating system, and it was managing more than $500M worth of GPUs before the company turned one.

What they build

Open source cluster OS

Role filled

Platform Engineer, Kubernetes

Profiles evaluated

2,004

Candidates introduced

13

Introduction to signed

7 weeks

Where

San Francisco, on-site

Aranya opened a Platform Engineer role in January. The brief was narrow on purpose: Kubernetes at cluster scale, GitOps migrations, CRDs and operators, all of it already shipped in production, all of it on-site in San Francisco.

That is a small population and most of it is employed. The founders were not sitting idle either. In the same months they were raising an $11M seed and putting half a billion dollars of GPUs under management.

They were also not willing to lower the bar to move faster. The team Aranya already had was the whole argument for being slow and careful about the next person on it.

Clera read 2,004 profiles against the brief. 154 were shortlisted with the team, and 13 were introduced. Nobody at Aranya had to look at the rest.

One of the 13 was a senior platform engineer who had scaled a platform four times over to more than a million concurrent users, cut latency by around 40%, and shipped Go Terraform providers that ten teams adopted.

The match went out on a Thursday. They said yes the same night, and Aranya had the profile twelve hours later. Five weeks after that came the offer, and two weeks after the offer it was signed.

Four things mattered to a small team hiring against a very specific bar.

A search, not a job post

The brief needed Kubernetes at cluster scale, GitOps migrations, CRDs and operators, all of it already shipped in production. Clera went looking for that instead of waiting to see who applied.

13 profiles reached the founders

2,004 were read against the role and 154 were shortlisted with the team. The other 1,991 never landed in anyone's inbox at Aranya.

Matched on the stack, not the title

The engineer who signed had scaled a platform four times over to more than a million concurrent users, cut latency around 40%, and shipped Go Terraform providers that ten teams picked up.

Nothing owed until the signature

No retainer and no fee while the search ran. 15% on the hire, once the offer was accepted.

• 2,004 profiles evaluated against the platform engineering brief
• 13 candidates introduced, 3 of them into interviews
• The engineer who signed said yes 11 hours after being matched
• Offer made 5 weeks after the introduction, signed 2 weeks after that