Senior AI Infra Platform Engineer (Remote)

Zim Directory; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 292,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare package

401k matching

Catered lunches

Flexible vacation time

Job summary

Descript is hiring for a senior platform engineer who will own the infrastructure that powers model training and inference, including GCP, Kubernetes, and the GPU fleet for production services. You will shape AI tooling, on-call practices, and security boundaries while balancing costs and reliability.

We value engineers who thrive in a small, high-surface team, make architectural decisions, mentor teammates, and write clear, human-friendly documentation.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating production distributed systems.
• You effectively leverage agents to multiply your impact and think critically about how and when to harness AI in your work.
• You've run systems where failure was expensive, and your opinions about reliability and deployment come from consequences rather than reading.
• You've carried a pager, commanded an incident, and rolled back before you understood why.
• You use SLOs and error budgets as operating tools.
• You've used a major cloud provider and Kubernetes in production, with infrastructure-as-code as your default.
• You've owned an architecture or migration, from planning through launch, whose consequences outlived the project, and you can say what you'd do differently.
• You've found important unowned work, scoped it, earned buy-in, and delivered it without being handed a spec.
• You build a minimal repro, read the logs, and write targeted checks to prove a fix works instead of trusting output.

Responsibilities

• Own our platform: GCP, Kubernetes, Temporal, GPU fleet behind cloud export, and the deploy and rollback machinery; be on-call and improve observability and runbooks.
• Own the AI enablement substrate: GPU capacity, training and inference pipelines, and reliability and cost of serving models.
• Make cost an engineering constraint: trade-offs in infrastructure, metering, and attribution as usage grows.
• Ensure security within the systems: identity and access, secrets management, least-privilege boundaries, and supply-chain integrity.
• Make what you build legible: IaC that explains itself, runbooks, and in-repo context for newcomers.
• Improve team learning and shipping: hypothesize, instrument, release incrementally, and strengthen tooling and standards.
• Raise the team's technical ambition: provide architectural direction, thoughtful reviews, mentoring, and clear human writing.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

On-call / incident mgmt

CI/CD / IaC

AI/ML infrastructure

Security engineering

Cost optimization

Leadership / mentoring

GCP

Job description

Descript is hiring for a senior platform engineer who will own the infrastructure that powers model training and inference, including GCP, Kubernetes, and the GPU fleet for production services. You will shape AI tooling, on-call practices, and security boundaries while balancing costs and reliability.

We value engineers who thrive in a small, high-surface team, make architectural decisions, mentor teammates, and write clear, human-friendly documentation.