ML Platform Engineer | Scale & Reliability

Lightning AI; San Francisco, Seattle (CA, WA); On-site; Full time

Job description

New York, New York, United States; San Francisco, California, United States; Seattle, Washington, United States

Who We Are

Lightning AI is the company behind PyTorch Lightning. Founded in 2019, we build an end-to-end platform for developing, training, and deploying AI systems—designed to take ideas from research to production with less friction.

Through our merger with Voltage Park, a neocloud and AI Factory, Lightning AI combines developer-first software with cost-efficient, large-scale compute. Teams get the tools they need for experimentation, training, and production inference, with security, observability, and control built in.

We serve solo researchers, startups, and large enterprises. Lightning AI operates globally with offices in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and London, and is backed by Coatue, Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Firstminute.

The Way We Work

The people who thrive here are builders who move fast, communicate openly, take ownership, and continuously improve themselves, their teams, and our company. Here's what that looks like in practice:

• Move with Urgency: We move quickly, make thoughtful decisions, and keep momentum. We value action over perfection and learn by shipping.
• Take Ownership: We own outcomes, not just our individual work. We make decisions that move the company forward and follow through.
• Communicate Openly: We communicate directly, seek to understand, and create clarity for others. Honest conversations help us move faster together.
• Build Great Teams: We lead by example, empower others, and create healthy teams where people can do their best work.
• Raise the Bar: We're always improving ourselves. We learn from feedback, consistently challenge ourselves to grow, and focus on the work that matters most.
• Think Long-Term: We design for what's next. We create scalable systems, simplify complexity, and use AI and automation to amplify our impact.

What We’re Looking For

Lightning AI is looking to hire an AI Platform Support Engineerto join our US Customer Experience team, supporting ML engineers running large-scale training and inference workloads across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and GPU platforms in production environments.

This role sits at the intersection of ML systems, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and customers. You’ll support engineers training models, deploying inference systems, and scaling GPU workloads in production.You are not a ticket router or traditional support engineer. You are a technical partner to ML teams - helping diagnose failures, improve reliability, and guide customers through complex distributed systems problems.

The problems range from Kubernetes scheduling and GPU orchestration to distributed PyTorch failures, inference latency, networking bottlenecks, storage performance, and platform reliability. You’ll gain exposure to a wide variety of real world AI workloads across industries and help shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of ML applications.

This role is hybrid out of our Seattle, San Francisco, or New York office hubs, with an in-office requirement of at least 2 days per week and occasional team and company offsites. The role follows a Monday–Friday schedule, with working hours from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM PST. We are not able to provide visa sponsorship for this role at this time.

What You'll Do

Work Directly With ML Engineers

• Partner directly with customer engineering teams running training and inference workloads in production
• Help customers diagnose and resolve complex distributed systems and ML infrastructure issues
• Act as a technical advisor during high impact incidents and platform degradation events
• Translate infrastructure level issues into actionable guidance for ML engineers
• Build credibility with customers through strong technical reasoning and clear communication
• Investigate failures involving distributed training, Kubernetes orchestration, GPU allocation, networking, and storage systems
• Troubleshoot PyTorch, CUDA, NCCL, and inference serving related issues
• Analyze logs, metrics, traces, and system behavior to isolate root causes
• Debug containerized workloads running across Kubernetes and bare metal GPU environments
• Support customers scaling workloads across multi node GPU systems
• Diagnose performance bottlenecks involving compute, memory, networking, or storage

Improve Reliability & Platform Operations

• Identify recurring patterns across customer issues and drive long term reliability improvements
• Contribute to post incident reviews and operational improvements
• Build internal tooling, automation, documentation, and runbooks
• Partner closely with infrastructure, networking, and platform engineering teams
• Help improve observability, operational visibility, and troubleshooting workflows
• Improve the customer experience through better processes and technical guidance

What This Role Is Not

• This is not a traditional help desk or ticket routing support role
• This is not purely customer success or account management
• This is not a backend engineering role
• This is not a passive escalation position

This role is for engineers who enjoy solving difficult technical problems while working closely with other engineers.

What You’ll Need

Required Qualifications

Infrastructure & Systems

• Strong software engineering and systems troubleshooting background
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized environments
• Linux systems knowledge, including networking, storage, process management, and performance tuning
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and distributed systems
• Experience with observability and debugging tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry

ML Infrastructure Experience

• Hands on experience operating machine learning workloads in production or research environments
• Experience with distributed ML systems and tooling such as PyTorch, CUDA, or NCCL
• Familiarity with GPU infrastructure and orchestration
• Experience troubleshooting performance, reliability, or scaling issues in ML infrastructure
• Understanding of the operational challenges involved in running ML systems at scale
• Strong communication skills and ability to work directly with highly technical customers and engineering teams
• Comfortable operating in fast moving, highly ambiguous environments
• Enjoys solving complex technical problems collaboratively

Ideal Experience

• Experience with large scale model training or distributed inference systems
• Familiarity with Ray, Kubeflow, Slurm, or similar distributed scheduling platforms
• Experience with InfiniBand, RDMA, or high-performance networking
• Experience operating bare metal infrastructure
• Familiarity with storage systems commonly used in ML environments
• Experience working at an AI infrastructure, cloud, MLOps, or developer tooling company
• Contributions to platform engineering, developer infrastructure, or operational tooling projects
• Experience writing automation, tooling, or scripts in Python or similar languages

We are committed to offering competitive compensation that reflects the value each team member brings to our mission. Final offers are based on factors such as experience, skills, geographic location, and role expectations. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package for eligible roles includes a discretionary bonus, a meaningful equity component, and comprehensive benefits.

The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is:

$115,000 - $140,000 USD

Benefits and Perks

We offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package designed to support our employees’ health, well-being, and long-term success:

• Comprehensive Health Coverage: Medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and eligible dependents.
• Meaningful Equity: RSUs that give employees a stake in the company's long-term success.
• Retirement Savings: 401(k) matching (U.S.) and pension contributions (U.K.).
• Flexible Time Off: Unlimited PTO, company holidays, and floating holidays to support work-life balance.
• Company-Wide Winter Break: Two weeks of company closure each winter to disconnect and recharge.
• Paid Parental & Family Leave: Paid leave to support you and your family through life's important moments.
• Professional Development: Annual learning and development allowance to support your professional growth.
• Wellness Benefits: Wellness and work-from-home stipends to support your physical and mental well-being.
• Sabbatical Program: Four weeks of paid sabbatical leave after four years of service.
• Flexible Work: Flexible schedules and a hybrid work model for our office-based teams.
• In-Office Meals: Complimentary meals at our office hubs.

Benefits may vary by location, team, and role.

At Lightning AI, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace. We believe that diverse teams drive innovation and create better products. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. We are dedicated to building a culture where everyone can thrive and contribute to their fullest potential.

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