Machine Learning Infrastructure Engineer

• Full-time Compensation: $200K–$400K + competitive early-stage equity

San Francisco, CA

• On-site (5 days/week)
• Full-time Compensation: $200K–$400K + competitive early-stage equity

Our client is a Series A AI research lab building large-scale foundation models for scientific and physical-AI domains. Backed by top-tier investors, they are pursuing a deliberately non-consensus technical thesis and are among the best-funded teams in their space. The founding team comes from self-driving, robotics, and scientific research, and they are scaling their research and engineering org significantly this year.

Founded 2024

• Small, fast-growing team
• Industry: AI / foundation models / physical AI

You would own the distributed training and inference backbone for a foundation model trained from scratch — standing up clusters, building data and training pipelines at petabyte scale, and squeezing performance out of GPUs at a low level across model scales.

• Design, deploy, and maintain large distributed ML training and inference clusters
• Build efficient, scalable end-to-end pipelines to manage petabyte-scale datasets and training across the full ML lifecycle
• Research and test training approaches, including parallelization techniques and numerical-precision trade-offs across model scales
• Profile and debug low-level GPU operations to optimize performance
• Track new research and bring fresh ideas into the work

Tech stack: Distributed training frameworks (FSDP, Deep Speed), NVIDIA GPUs, Linux, Python, C++, Kubernetes/Docker, and a major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure).

• 2–10 years building large-scale ML infrastructure for core foundation models
• Hands-on experience building infrastructure for foundation models trained from scratch, rather than fine-tuning existing models
• A background at a science-focused or physical-AI company (for example self-driving, robotics, or biology)
• Deep, demonstrable expertise optimizing large-scale training and inference workloads
• Working proficiency with distributed training frameworks such as FSDP or Deep Speed
• A clear pattern of intentional, mission-driven career decisions
• Able to work on-site 5 days/week in San Francisco (relocation supported)

• Generalist experience spanning the full ML lifecycle
• Low-level GPU performance optimization and debugging (CUDA, JAX)

• Take a bet on a distinctive, non-consensus approach to building intelligence
• Join early, with real ownership of the training and inference backbone
• Work in a domain with fast, objective ground-truth feedback and data at a scale beyond typical LLM training
• Well-funded and building a strong, senior research and engineering team

• Location:
  
  San Francisco, CA
• Work policy:
  In-person 5 days/week (relocation supported)
• Compensation: $200K–$400K + competitive early-stage equity
• Visa sponsorship:
  Open to supporting work authorization for the right candidate
• Employment type:
  
  Full-time