Customer Cluster Engineer

Iframe; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive base salary band

Job summary

iframe.ai is seeking a Senior Customer Engineer in the US to own three to five reserved-capacity accounts, guiding training and inference performance end-to-end. You will collaborate with a sales engineer and an account manager to manage technical relationships from kickoff through renewal.

Five-plus years in distributed- or ML-systems engineering with 64+ GPU jobs, strong PyTorch and CUDA know-how, and the ability to discuss technical scope with executives are required.

Qualifications

• Five-plus years of distributed-systems or ML-systems engineering — production experience with 64+ GPU jobs is required.
• Strong PyTorch / FSDP / Megatron-LM debugging skills.
• Working knowledge of CUDA and at least one of Triton or CUTLASS.
• Strong communicator. You'll write four post-mortems a quarter and present at customer all-hands.
• Comfort with executive-level conversations on technical scope, timelines, and trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Own three to five reserved-capacity accounts as their named customer engineer. Most are AI labs or AI-native scale-ups running 256–2048-GPU jobs.
• Profile distributed training jobs: NCCL collectives, gradient overlap, checkpoint cost, MFU. Make and defend specific recommendations.
• Tune kernels and configurations alongside the runtime team — your changes go through the same review process and ship in the same release train.
• Run the technical pre-sales for your accounts' expansions and renewals: pilot design, scope, success criteria, post-mortem.
• Lead the post-mortem on any P1 affecting your accounts; escalate root-cause work into the runtime, cluster, or platform teams.
• Carry the customer-engineering on-call rotation alongside runtime and cluster SRE — about one week per six.

Skills

Distributed systems

ML systems engineering

PyTorch

FSDP

Megatron-LM

Tools

CUDA

Triton

CUTLASS

NCCL

wandb

Job description

Customer engineering at iframe.ai is not solutions architecture and is not customer support. You will be embedded with three to five reserved-capacity accounts at a time, owning their training and inference performance end-to-end. The same engineers who tune the kernel pick up the page.

Stack PyTorch FSDP / Megatron-LM CUDA / Triton NCCL wandb / aim Linux perf InfiniBand familiarity

Hiring manager replies within 5 business days.

The team

About the team

Customer engineering is a small team of senior engineers — most have prior runtime, SRE, or research experience. You're paired with a single account manager who handles commercial; you handle the technical relationship from kickoff through renewal.

Reports to the head of customer engineering. Paired one-to-one with a sales engineer / AE for commercial.

The role

What you'll do

• 01 Own three to five reserved-capacity accounts as their named customer engineer. Most are AI labs or AI-native scale-ups running 256–2048-GPU jobs.

• 02 Profile distributed training jobs: NCCL collectives, gradient overlap, checkpoint cost, MFU. Make and defend specific recommendations.

• 03 Tune kernels and configurations alongside the runtime team — your changes go through the same review process and ship in the same release train.

• 04 Run the technical pre-sales for your accounts' expansions and renewals: pilot design, scope, success criteria, post-mortem.

• 05 Lead the post-mortem on any P1 affecting your accounts; escalate root-cause work into the runtime, cluster, or platform teams.

• 06 Carry the customer-engineering on-call rotation alongside runtime and cluster SRE — about one week per six.

The bar

What we're looking for

Five-plus years of distributed-systems or ML-systems engineering — production experience with 64+ GPU jobs is required.

Strong PyTorch / FSDP / Megatron-LM debugging skills. You can read a wandb run and tell us where time is going.

Working knowledge of CUDA and at least one of Triton or CUTLASS. You don't need to write them daily; you need to read them.

Strong communicator. You'll write four post-mortems a quarter and present at customer all-hands.

Comfort with executive-level conversations on technical scope, timelines, and trade-offs.

Nice to have, not required

Prior frontier-lab or hyperscaler training-team experience.

Experience running benchmarks at customer sites (MLPerf or similar).

Open-source contributions to PyTorch, FSDP, NCCL, or the major training frameworks.

Comfort with Slack-based customer relationships and high-tempo asynchronous communication.

Compensation

In writing, like everything else

We publish bands. We meet them. The number you see on the offer is the same number your future peers got at the same level. We do not negotiate; we level.

Base

$220,000 – $320,000 USD (US, IC4 / IC5).

Equity

Meaningful early-stage equity, refreshed on tenure milestones.

Notes

No revenue-tied compensation. Customer engineers are not compensated on the size or renewal of the accounts they own; they are compensated on technical impact.

How to apply

One email is enough

Send a short note to [e-mail] with the role title in the subject line. Include your CV or LinkedIn, one or two links to work you're proud of, and a sentence on why this role specifically. Hiring managers reply within five business days, regardless of outcome.

01

Application

A hiring manager reads every email. Reply within five business days.

02

30–45 minutes. Scope, role, mutual fit. We share the comp band on this call.

03

Technical loop

3–4 sessions on the same day. Real problems, no homework, no whiteboard riddles.

04

Offer

Same-week offer at the published band for your level. Start dates are flexible.

Equal opportunity

We hire on the work. Race, gender, age, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and veteran status do not factor into our decisions. We sponsor visas for senior roles in the US, UK, and EU — bring it up on the manager call.

Need an accommodation for the interview process? Mention it in your application or write [e-mail] .

If this role isn't quite right but you'd be a fit at iframe.ai, write anyway.

Senior engineers and researchers can apply outside the listed roles. The bar is the same. The reply window is the same.