RL Systems Engineer - Scale, Reliability & Observability

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 500,000 - 850,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC in San Francisco is seeking an experienced software engineer to design, build, and operate RL-scale distributed systems. You will work across training, sampling, and environment execution on a large fleet, with a focus on reliability and performance.

You will collaborate with researchers and performance engineers to preserve training correctness, reduce tail latency, and implement observability, fault tolerance, and automation across the stack.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills in Python and at least one systems language (Rust, C++, or Go).
• Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including consistency, coordination, and failure modes.
• Ability to reason quantitatively about throughput, latency, and resource costs across compute, memory, storage, and network.
• Experience debugging complex failures across many hosts and services.
• Strong written communication, including design documents and incident writeups.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the distributed systems that run RL at scale, across training, sampling, and environment execution
• Find and remove whatever currently limits the system, whether it's scheduling, data movement, storage, networking, or coordination
• Build fault tolerance into every layer: failure detection, isolation, and recovery that keep long-running jobs making progress without human intervention
• Design resource management and autoscaling so that compute follows demand as a run's needs shift
• Build observability that makes it possible to understand what a run is doing and why it slowed down, stalled, or produced unexpected results
• Build automation that detects and remediates common problems, and design interfaces that let engineers and automated tools operate runs safely
• Work with researchers and performance engineers to make sure systems changes preserve training correctness and don't introduce subtle nondeterminism
• Remove classes of failure at their source through incident review, testing, and redesign, and write clear design documents for what you build

Skills

Python

Rust

C++

Go

Distributed systems

Performance analysis

Debugging

Technical writing

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

United States Digital Space LLC in San Francisco is seeking an experienced software engineer to design, build, and operate RL-scale distributed systems. You will work across training, sampling, and environment execution on a large fleet, with a focus on reliability and performance.

You will collaborate with researchers and performance engineers to preserve training correctness, reduce tail latency, and implement observability, fault tolerance, and automation across the stack.