Member of Technical Staff (AI Infrastructure Engineer) at Perplexity

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