Member of Technical Staff — Compute Cluster

Causal Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Causal Labs is building a Large Physics foundation Model and GPU-driven compute environment to enable rapid research iteration at scale. You will design, deploy, and operate massive GPU clusters, extending Kubernetes and Slurm for efficient, multi-tenant workloads.

You will own end-to-end stack from provisioning to observability, collaborating with researchers to optimize performance and placement. A strong systems background and experience with CUDA/NCCL are essential.

Qualifications

• Experience operating large-scale GPU clusters and container orchestration frameworks (e.g. Kubernetes, Slurm, Docker).
• Strong systems background: Linux, networking, storage, infrastructure-as-code.
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure) and their ML/AI service offerings.
• Understanding of monitoring, logging, observability, and version control best practices for ML systems.
• Familiarity with CUDA/NCCL and performance profiling for distributed workloads.
• Owns deliverables end‑to‑end, from requirements through autonomous execution.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate large distributed GPU clusters end to end: provisioning, imaging, upgrades, and capacity planning.
• Extend scheduling and orchestration systems for topology-aware placement, preemption, quotas, and multi-tenancy across training and inference workloads.
• Build software that abstracts cluster management and presents a unified, self-serve interface to researchers and engineers.
• Own cluster storage and artifact paths for checkpoints and logs, with clear retention and lineage.
• Monitor and continuously improve reliability and error recovery; build the observability to catch failures before researchers do.
• Partner with researchers to unblock large-scale runs and advise on performance and placement trade-offs.

Skills

Large-scale GPU clusters

Container orchestration

System administration

Performance profiling

Observability

End-to-end ownership

Tools

Kubernetes

Slurm

Docker

Linux

Networking

Cloud platforms (GCP/AWS/Azure)

Job description

Our mission is general causal intelligence; AI that is capable of (1) predicting the future and (2) identifying the actions to alter it.

To achieve this breakthrough, we are building a Large Physics foundation Model (LPM) because physical systems, unlike text or images, are governed by verifiable cause and effect. We believe that scaling on physics will enable an understanding of causality required to predict and control physical systems, starting with weather.

Our founding team has built and deployed AI against the physical world in robotics, drug discovery, and particle physics at institutions like DeepMind, Waymo, Cruise, Insitro, Nabla Bio, and CERN.

We look for infrastructure engineers who are excited to tackle unsolved problems. Everything we do — training, evaluation, serving — runs on our GPU fleet. Your mission is to design, build, and operate the supercomputing environment underneath it all, delivering performant, reliable, and cost‑efficient compute to ensure research is able to iterate rapidly at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate large distributed GPU clusters end to end: provisioning, imaging, upgrades, and capacity planning

• Extend scheduling and orchestration systems (e.g. Kubernetes, Slurm) for topology‑aware placement, preemption, quotas, and multi‑tenancy across training and inference workloads

• Build software that abstracts cluster management and presents a unified, self‑serve interface to researchers and engineers

• Own cluster storage and artifact paths for checkpoints and logs, with clear retention and lineage

• Monitor and continuously improve reliability and error recovery; build the observability to catch failures before researchers do

• Partner with researchers to unblock large‑scale runs and advise on performance and placement trade‑offs

What we're looking for

We value a relentless approach to problem‑solving, rapid execution, and the ability to quickly learn in unfamiliar domains.

• Experience operating large‑scale GPU clusters and container orchestration frameworks (e.g. Kubernetes, Slurm, Docker)

• Strong systems background: Linux, networking, storage, infrastructure‑as‑code

• Knowledge of cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure) and their ML/AI service offerings

• Understanding of monitoring, logging, observability, and version control best practices for ML systems

• Familiarity with CUDA/NCCL and performance profiling for distributed workloads

• Owns deliverables end‑to‑end, from requirements through autonomous execution