Member of Technical Staff, Traffic Infrastructure

Fireworks; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

Fireworks is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to own the traffic layer behind our generative AI platform, including proxies, load balancers, service mesh, and routing across regions and clouds.

You will collaborate with ML, product, and platform teams, mentor engineers, and drive scalable infrastructure with a focus on availability and cost efficiency. This role requires deep distributed systems expertise in high-throughput environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 5+ years building backend or network infrastructure in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Strong software development skills in Go, C++, Rust, Java, or Python.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and networking fundamentals, including performance optimization.
• Full product lifecycle ownership, from design through implementation to production.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build scalable, fault-tolerant traffic and networking services, including ingress/egress, load balancing, routing, and QoS controls.
• Lead technical design discussions, mentor other engineers, and establish best practices for operating large-scale infrastructure.
• Drive network optimization both inside and outside data centers, including cost reduction and performance tuning.
• Evaluate and integrate cloud-native/open-source technologies (Kubernetes, Envoy, Istio) to strengthen platform capabilities.
• Own systems end to end, from design through deployment and observability, emphasizing high availability and disaster recovery.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive monitoring, alerting, logging, and tracing for deep system health insights.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud networking

Go

C++

Python

Load balancing

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or related

Master's or PhD in CS (preferred)

Tools

Kubernetes

Envoy

Istio

Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Job description

About Us:

Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI.

The Role:

As a Member of Technical Staff on our Traffic Infrastructure team, you will own the traffic layer behind our generative AI platform: the proxies, load balancers, service mesh, and routing systems that move every request reliably across regions and cloud providers. This is a highly technical role that calls for depth in distributed systems, cloud networking, and infrastructure, along with the judgment to balance latency, cost, and operational simplicity. You will partner closely with ML, product, and platform teams, and help set the technical direction for the team.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and build scalable, fault-tolerant traffic and networking services, including ingress and egress, load balancing, routing, and quality-of-service controls.

• Lead technical design discussions, mentor other engineers, and establish best practices for operating large-scale infrastructure.

• Drive network optimization both inside and outside data centers, including cost reduction, performance tuning, and removing scaling bottlenecks.

• Evaluate and integrate cloud-native and open-source technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Envoy, Istio) to strengthen platform capabilities and reliability.

• Own systems end to end, from design through deployment and observability, with an emphasis on high availability, disaster recovery, and operational excellence.

• Develop and maintain comprehensive monitoring, alerting, logging, and tracing to give deep insight into system health and performance.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).

• 5+ years of experience building backend or network infrastructure in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).

• Strong software development skills in languages such as Go, C++, Rust, Java, or Python.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems and networking fundamentals, including performance optimization.

• Full product lifecycle ownership, from design through implementation to production.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.

• Hands-on experience with traffic or edge engineering, service mesh, or cloud networking (e.g., Envoy, Istio, DPDK).

• Deep Kubernetes experience, including ingress, network policy, and custom controllers.

• Track record of improving performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency on high-throughput systems.

• Experience leading projects across teams and coaching distributed engineers.

Why Fireworks?

• Solve Hard Problems: Tackle challenges at the forefront of AI infrastructure, from low-latency inference to scalable model serving.

• Build What’s Next: Work with bleeding-edge technology that impacts how businesses and developers harness AI globally.

• Ownership & Impact: Join a fast-growing, passionate team where your work directly shapes the future of AI—no bureaucracy, just results.

• Learn from the Best: Collaborate with world-class engineers and AI researchers who thrive on curiosity and innovation.

Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all innovators.