Distributed Software Engineer

Cerebras Systems; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Cerebras Systems is seeking a cluster engineering-focused engineer to design and operate the software stack that keeps thousands of Cerebras systems up, healthy, and observable. You will work on bare-metal automation, Kubernetes-based scheduling, and multi-tenant control planes for high-throughput AI workloads.

The role emphasizes Go and Python proficiency, deep Kubernetes expertise, and experience with Prometheus/Grafana; familiarity with AI tooling and large-scale HPC environments is highly

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating production distributed systems or infrastructure software.
• Production-quality Go and Python.
• Real Kubernetes depth: controllers & operators, CRDs, reconciliation, informer caches, admission webhooks, RBAC.
• Strong debugging skills across distributed systems, Linux, and networking.
• Prometheus and Grafana as a practitioner: PromQL, exporter design, cardinality discipline, alerts.
• Strong self-driving capability in a large, fast-moving, partially documented environment.
• Demonstrated adoption of AI in engineering workflow with coding agents and rigorous verification.

Responsibilities

• Declarative, CRD-driven automation of bare-metal networking, OS, and app software across clusters.
• Push-button cluster install, upgrade, and patching with downtime budgets and canaries.
• Kubernetes operators that schedule large inference workloads with resource locks and priority queues.
• gRPC control-plane services, authorization, admission webhooks, and quota policy for multi-tenant fleet.
• Metrics and log pipelines with exporters for wafer-scale systems, servers, and network fabric, on Prometheus and Grafana with SLOs and alerts.
• Failure detection, HA control planes, automated recovery, plus CLIs, APIs, and MCP gateway exposing fleet to users and AI agents.

Skills

Go

Python

Kubernetes

Distributed systems

Debugging

Prometheus

Grafana

AI tooling

Self-learning

Tools

Redfish

IPMI

gNMI

sFlow

Prometheus

Grafana

RBAC

CRDs

Job description

Cerebras Systems builds the world’s largest AI chip, 56 times larger than GPUs. This architecture allows Cerebras to deliver industry-leading training and inference speeds; over 10 times faster than GPU-based hyperscale cloud inference services.

This order of magnitude increase in speed is transforming the user experience of AI applications, unlocking real-time iteration and increasing intelligence via additional agentic computation.

Cerebras works with the leading model labs, global enterprises, and cutting-edge AI-native startups. OpenAI recently announced a multi-year partnership with Cerebras, to deploy 750 megawatts of scale, transforming key workloads with ultra high-speed inference.

The Role

The Cluster engineering team owns the software that turns thousands of wafers, servers, and switches into a cloud that stays up, stays busy, and stays debuggable. We stand clusters up from bare metal, schedule training and inference workloads across the fleet, keep it healthy, and make it observable to users, operators, and increasingly to AI agents. The stack is Go and Python on Kubernetes, running both on-premise deployments and our own cloud.

Responsibilities

• Declarative, CRD-driven automation of bare-metal networking, OS, and application software across clusters of Cerebras systems, servers, and switches, built to reconcile thousands of nodes
• Push-button cluster install, upgrade, and security patching with real downtime budgets, gated by canaries
• Kubernetes operators that schedule large inference workload: resource locks, priority queues, network topology, and health-aware placement
• gRPC control-plane services, authorization, admission webhooks, and quota policy for a multi-tenant fleet
• Metrics and log pipelines with purpose-built exporters for wafer-scale systems, servers (Redfish, IPMI), and network fabric (gNMI, sFlow), on Prometheus and Grafana, with SLOs and alerting
• Failure detection, HA control planes, and automated recovery, plus the CLIs, APIs, and MCP gateway that expose the fleet to users, operators, and AI agents

Skills and Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating production distributed systems or infrastructure software
• Production-quality Go and Python
• Real Kubernetes depth: you have written or debugged controllers and operators, and you understand CRDs, reconciliation semantics, informer caches, admission webhooks, and RBAC
• Strong debugging skills across distributed systems, Linux, and networking
• Prometheus and Grafana as a practitioner: PromQL, exporter design, cardinality discipline, useful alerts
• Strong self-driving capability. This environment is large, fast-moving, and not fully documented, so we need engineers who build their own context, decide, and drive work across team boundaries. Learning speed matters more here than familiarity with our stack.
• Demonstrated adoption of AI in your engineering workflow: active use of coding agents, a view on where they help and where they mislead, and the rigor to verify what they produce.
• Nice to have: bare-metal or HPC fleet operations, scheduler internals, RDMA/RoCE and eBPF networking, Ceph or NVMe-oF, etcd and HA upgrades, inference serving stacks. ML research experience is not required.

Why Join Cerebras

People who are serious about software make their own hardware. At Cerebras, we have built a breakthrough architecture that is unlocking new opportunities for the AI industry. With dozens of model releases and rapid growth, we’ve reached an inflection point in our business. Members of our team tell us there are five main reasons they joined Cerebras:

1. Build a breakthrough AI platform beyond the constraints of the GPU.
2. Publish and open source their cutting-edge AI research.
3. Work on one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.
4. Enjoy job stability with startup vitality.
5. Our simple, non-corporate work culture that respects individual beliefs.

Find out more about what it’s like to work at Cerebras here!

Cerebras Systems is committed to creating an equal and diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe inclusive teams build better products and companies. We try every day to build a work environment that empowers people to do their best work through continuous learning, growth and support of those around them.