Senior Systems Engineer for Scalable AI Training Infra

River AI; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 420,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Relocation assistance

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

River AI is seeking exceptional systems engineers to build the high-performance engines that train our models in Palo Alto, CA. You will own the core infrastructure stack, from writing custom GPU kernels to managing clusters of thousands of nodes, ensuring researchers can focus on science rather than system bottlenecks.

The role emphasizes fault-tolerant distributed systems, GPU kernel design, and collaboration with research scientists to scale experimental model architectures.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical industry experience.
• Deep expertise in systems-level languages (C, C++, or Rust) with a track record of writing performant, maintainable code.
• Strong foundation in computer architecture, memory management, and concurrent programming.
• Exceptional debugging skills, especially when tackling complex, non-deterministic issues in distributed environments.
• A highly collaborative mindset and a bias for action to push boundaries across the stack.

Responsibilities

• Architect and deploy fault-tolerant distributed systems for training and inference workloads across clusters with thousands of nodes.
• Design high-performance kernels to maximize tensor operation efficiency, memory throughput, and networking over InfiniBand/RDMA.
• Profile systems end-to-end to resolve blockers across hardware, software, data loading pipelines, and collective communication primitives.
• Partner directly with research scientists to rapidly implement, optimize, and scale experimental model architectures.

Skills

C/C++/Rust

Distributed systems

Computer architecture

Debugging

Collaborative mindset

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE or equivalent

Tools

GPU kernels

InfiniBand/RDMA

PyTorch/JAX

Job description

River AI is seeking exceptional systems engineers to build the high-performance engines that train our models in Palo Alto, CA. You will own the core infrastructure stack, from writing custom GPU kernels to managing clusters of thousands of nodes, ensuring researchers can focus on science rather than system bottlenecks.

The role emphasizes fault-tolerant distributed systems, GPU kernel design, and collaboration with research scientists to scale experimental model architectures.