Senior Reliability Engineer — AI Infrastructure & SRE

Fireworks; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Fireworks AI is seeking a Reliability Engineer to shape the platform’s dependability as it scales. You will own SLOs, error budgets, and production readiness, defining the reliability bar for services and guiding teams to meet it.

The role spans cloud infrastructure, AI systems, and product teams to ensure fast, cheap, and dependable model serving. Ideal candidates bring 5+ years in systems engineering, proficiency with Linux, Python, Go, C++, or Rust, and hands-on experience with Kubernetes,

Qualifications

• 5+ years with Linux internals, system performance troubleshooting, and networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, HTTP, gRPC).
• 5+ years in Python, Go, C++, or Rust, writing production-grade tools and systems code.
• Operating and debugging Kubernetes, Terraform, and Docker in high-throughput production.
• Distributed systems: High-throughput control planes, microservices, or multi-region setups.
• Fault-tolerant design, SLO/SLA management, automated failover, high-availability architecture.
• Influence without authority: You can get other teams to adopt a standard through credibility and useful tooling rather than mandate.
• Breadth over comfort: Willingness to dig into unfamiliar parts of the stack when a problem crosses boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Define reliability standards: SLOs, error budgets, production readiness criteria. Not written in a vacuum: you instrument the systems and read the real telemetry the numbers come from.
• Own the reliability toolchain: Logging and telemetry pipelines, alerting standards, failure injection, load testing, self-healing automation, and AI-assisted investigation tooling.
• Keep customer experience from falling through the cracks: Per-service reliability is necessary but not sufficient. A customer can hit a bad experience while every system sits inside its SLO. You make sure those failures get an owner and a fix.
• Own the seams: The hardest failures live between systems: retries that amplify load, timeouts that do not compose, dependencies nobody mapped. You find them before customers do and drive fixes through the teams that own them.
• Run incident management: Coordinate live production issues, run blameless postmortems, and track follow-ups to completion.
• Reduce toil: Automate repetitive operational work so growth does not turn into an unsustainable on-call load.
• Partner across the org: Cloud infrastructure on capacity and multi-region risk, inference and training on failure modes in the serving and training stacks, performance on zero-downtime rollouts, product and control plane on customer-facing reliability.

Skills

Linux internals

Performance troubleshooting

Networking fundamentals

Python

Go

C++

Rust

Kubernetes

Terraform

Docker

Distributed systems

SLO/SLA management

Fault-tolerant design

Influence without authority

Broad stack knowledge

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science/Engineering

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Fireworks AI is seeking a Reliability Engineer to shape the platform’s dependability as it scales. You will own SLOs, error budgets, and production readiness, defining the reliability bar for services and guiding teams to meet it.

The role spans cloud infrastructure, AI systems, and product teams to ensure fast, cheap, and dependable model serving. Ideal candidates bring 5+ years in systems engineering, proficiency with Linux, Python, Go, C++, or Rust, and hands-on experience with Kubernetes,