Senior Staff Engineer, Inference Platform (Kubernetes)

Cerebras Systems; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Cerebras Systems is hiring a Staff Engineer for the Inference Platform to help lead and contribute to production-grade software across our datacenter clusters. You’ll work on the orchestration layer that connects cloud components with ML services, solving hard problems in Kubernetes operators, security policies, and CI/CD.

You'll influence platform direction, drive reliability and performance, and collaborate with ML, product, infrastructure, and cloud teams to shape scalable system designs.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture, ideally with Kubernetes.
• Strong track record of making sound architectural decisions for highly available, latency-sensitive systems at scale.
• Experience with security (certificates, TLS, mTLS).
• Experience optimizing latency, throughput, and efficiency in high-QPS systems.
• Strong proficiency in backend or systems languages such as Go or C++, with the expectation that you can contribute production code directly.
• Experience designing observability and reliability practices, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, incident response, and SLO-driven operations.
• Ability to influence senior engineers and cross-functional partners through technical credibility, communication, and judgment.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain production software, spanning testing, CI/CD, observability, security, networking, and productionization.
• Raise the effectiveness of senior engineers through design feedback, pairing, and clear technical standards.
• Platform Direction. Shape the technical direction for the Inference Platform, CRDs, failure domains, and system evolution, owning roadmaps for major areas.
• Reliability & Performance. Architect active-active systems with rapid failover, graceful degradation, and clear SLOs; improve latency, throughput, capacity, and resilience.
• Execution on Critical Paths. Write and review production code in key platform areas; make high-consequence architectural decisions and set the bar.
• Production Leadership. Lead on hard production issues and cross-system bottlenecks, drive observability and incident response with operational rigor.
• Technical Influence. Collaborate with ML, Product, Infrastructure, and Cloud teams to translate requirements into scalable designs.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Go

C++

Backend / Systems programming

Observability & reliability

Technical leadership

Communication & collaboration

Job description

Cerebras Systems is hiring a Staff Engineer for the Inference Platform to help lead and contribute to production-grade software across our datacenter clusters. You’ll work on the orchestration layer that connects cloud components with ML services, solving hard problems in Kubernetes operators, security policies, and CI/CD.

You'll influence platform direction, drive reliability and performance, and collaborate with ML, product, infrastructure, and cloud teams to shape scalable system designs.