Machine Learning Infrastructure Engineer

WindBorne Systems; Redwood City (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k)

Dental insurance

Health insurance

Vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Stock Option Plan

Office food and beverages

Job summary

WindBorne Systems, based in Redwood City, CA, is building a weather balloon constellation and AI models to deliver fast, global forecasts. The team seeks a hands-on engineer to own ML production systems, data pipelines, and scalable inference across on‑prem and cloud resources.

Ideal candidates deploy reliable models, monitor health, and optimize compute, data quality, and latency to support critical weather intelligence and decisions.

Qualifications

• Experience running production ML systems and scalable deployments.
• Experience handling very large datasets for real-time inference.
• Ability to build reliable, well-documented pipelines and services.
• Familiarity with PyTorch, containerization and fault-tolerant design.

Responsibilities

• Own uptime end-to-end for real-time forecast models.
• Build health monitoring, logging, and failure diagnosis across nodes.
• Scale inference and manage on-prem and cloud compute/storage.
• Create robust data pipelines with QC and alerting.

Skills

Production ML systems

Large datasets

Model deployment

Logging & monitoring

Compute scaling

System reliability

Tools

PyTorch

Docker

Job description

apply now WindBorne Systems is supercharging weather forecasts with a unique proprietary data source: a global constellation of next-generation smart weather balloons targeting the most critical atmospheric data. We design, manufacture, and operate our own balloons, using the data they collect to generate otherwise unattainable weather intelligence. Our mission is to eliminate weather uncertainty, and in the process help humanity adapt to climate change, be that predicting hurricanes or speeding the adoption of renewables. We are building a future in which the planet is instrumented by thousands of our microballoons, eliminating gaps in our understanding of the planet and giving people and businesses the information they need to make critical decisions. The founding team of Stanford engineers was named Forbes 2019 30 under 30 and is backed by top-tier investors, including Khosla Ventures and Footwork VC. WindBorne builds AI weather models that run 24/7, producing global forecasts every 20 minutes. Our research team is small and moves fast — but too much of their time goes to operationalization and infra firefighting instead of model development. We need someone to fix that.

Snapshot of the balloon constellation ON MARCH 31, 2026

Responsibilities

• What you’d own:
• Research to Operations pipelines — Our models serve real-time forecasts to customers with strict latency requirements. You'd own uptime end-to-end: build health monitoring, improve logging, diagnose failures across nodes.
• Inference scaling & compute strategy — We have an on-prem cluster but also use cloud providers, especially for production deployments. You'd evaluate cost/performance tradeoffs across cloud options as we scale, and also help manage growing on-prem resources for compute and storage.
• Data pipelines & upstream reliability — Weather data comes from dozens of sources (satellites, government agencies, our own balloon observations) with varying schedules, incomplete documentation and sometimes failing or changing quality. You'd build pipelines for training and realtime data that gracefully handle upstream delays, do QC checks on data, and add logging and alerting for a zoo of edge cases.
• Training infrastructure — Make distributed training runs reliable. They die from silent OOMs, network faults, and storage issues. Build monitoring, auto-recovery, and job scheduling so researchers can launch experiments with less need for babysitting them.

Requirements

Skills and Qualifications

• Have experience running production ML systems — you’re not just good at fighting fires but also know how to build systems that don’t catch on fire
• Experience with large datasets
• Comfortable keeping up with fast-paced model releases and building reliable custom deployments for them
• Experience with PyTorch, Docker, cursed memory management, compression and debugging network saturation
• Affinity for systems and structure — you can counterbalance a research team’s natural state of chaos with well-organized infrastructure and clear processes

Nice to haves

• Experience with weather data, geospatial pipelines, or scientific computing
• Experience with very large datasets, on the petabyte scale
• Experience managing GPU clusters or job schedulers

Benefits

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Stock Option Plan
• Office food and beverages

Salary

• $140k-$240K We are considering a range of backgrounds and experience levels for this position and adjust our offers accordingly to be competitive with market rates.

Location

1600 Bridge Pwky, Redwood City, CA. In person required.

What our hardware looks like