PE

AI Infra Engineer (San Francisco)

Perplexity
Posted onFeb 16, 2026
LocationSan Francisco, California, United States (On-site)
Employment typeFull-time
Salary$210k – $385k Yearly

We are looking for an AI Infra engineer to join our growing team. We work with Kubernetes, Slurm, Python, C++, PyTorch, and primarily on AWS. As an AI Infrastructure Engineer, you will be partnering closely with our Inference and Research teams to build, deploy, and optimize our large-scale AI training and inference clusters

Responsibilities

  • Design, deploy, and maintain scalable Kubernetes clusters for AI model inference and training workloads

  • Manage and optimize Slurm-based HPC environments for distributed training of large language models

  • Develop robust APIs and orchestration systems for both training pipelines and inference services

  • Implement resource scheduling and job management systems across heterogeneous compute environments

  • Benchmark system performance, diagnose bottlenecks, and implement improvements across both training and inference infrastructure

  • Build monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions tailored to ML workloads running on Kubernetes and Slurm

  • Respond swiftly to system outages and collaborate across teams to maintain high uptime for critical training runs and inference services

  • Optimize cluster utilization and implement autoscaling strategies for dynamic workload demands

Qualifications

  • Strong expertise in Kubernetes administration, including custom resource definitions, operators, and cluster management

  • Hands-on experience with Slurm workload management, including job scheduling, resource allocation, and cluster optimization

  • Experience with deploying and managing distributed training systems at scale

  • Deep understanding of container orchestration and distributed systems architecture

  • High level familiarity with LLM architecture and training processes (Multi-Head Attention, Multi/Grouped-Query, distributed training strategies)

  • Experience managing GPU clusters and optimizing compute resource utilization

Required Skills

  • Expert-level Kubernetes administration and YAML configuration management

  • Proficiency with Slurm job scheduling, resource management, and cluster configuration

  • Python and C++ programming with focus on systems and infrastructure automation

  • Hands-on experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch in distributed training contexts

  • Strong understanding of networking, storage, and compute resource management for ML workloads

  • Experience developing APIs and managing distributed systems for both batch and real-time workloads

  • Solid debugging and monitoring skills with expertise in observability tools for containerized environments

Preferred Skills

  • Experience with Kubernetes operators and custom controllers for ML workloads

  • Advanced Slurm administration including multi-cluster federation and advanced scheduling policies

  • Familiarity with GPU cluster management and CUDA optimization

  • Experience with other ML frameworks like TensorFlow or distributed training libraries

  • Background in HPC environments, parallel computing, and high-performance networking

  • Knowledge of infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible) and GitOps practices

  • Experience with container registries, image optimization, and multi-stage builds for ML workloads

Required Experience

  • Demonstrated experience managing large-scale Kubernetes deployments in production environments

  • Proven track record with Slurm cluster administration and HPC workload management

  • Previous roles in SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineering with focus on ML infrastructure

  • Experience supporting both long-running training jobs and high-availability inference services

  • Ideally, 3-5 years of relevant experience in ML systems deployment with specific focus on cluster orchestration and resource management

Salary: $210K – $385K • Offers Equity

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, real-time answers to questions backed by credible sources and citations.

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