Site Reliability Engineer

Baseten; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Healthcare coverage

Winter Break PTO

Parental leave

Fertility stipend

401(k) plan

ML startup exposure

Job summary

Baseten seeks a Site Reliability Engineer to define gold standards for day 2 operations of our ML infrastructure platform. You will build robust systems, automate mitigations, and expand observability to keep services reliable at scale across multiple clouds.

You will partner with engineering, forward‑deployed teams, and product groups to reduce failure patterns and raise the operational floor for the company. A strong foundation in runbooks and post‑mortem analysis is essential.

Qualifications

• Extensive hands‑on experience with Kubernetes (multi‑cloud experience across EKS, GKE, or similar is a strong plus).
• Experience in building and maintaining scalable infrastructure.
• Strong foundation in observability tooling: metrics (VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus), logging (Loki, ELK), dashboards (Grafana), and alerting pipelines. Observability‑as‑code experience is a plus.
• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, Helm) and GitOps workflows (Flux CD, ArgoCD).
• Experience writing and improving runbooks, leading incident response, and doing post‑mortem analysis.
• Comfort working at the intersection of engineering and operations — you write code, but you also think deeply about process, escalation paths, and operational leverage.
• Familiarity with incident management platforms (incident.io or similar) is a plus.
• No prior ML experience required, but curiosity about how ML models are deployed and served at scale will serve you well.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability of Baseten's multi‑cloud Kubernetes infrastructure, including incident response, post‑mortems, and remediation tracking.
• Build and maintain observability infrastructure — metrics, logging, dashboards, and alerting — as code.
• Author, validate, and improve runbooks for recurring failure patterns, ensuring they're structured for low‑context, safe execution.
• Identify high‑frequency failure patterns and convert them into automated mitigations or self‑healing automations.
• Diagnose and resolve runtime issues related to latency, memory behavior, GPU utilization, concurrency, and model lifecycle management.
• Define and instrument SLOs and SLIs across customer workloads and internal services.
• Navigate ambiguity, make principled tradeoffs, and avoid unnecessary complexity in the systems you build and the processes you define.

Skills

Kubernetes

Multi-cloud

Observability tooling

Infrastructure-as-code

GitOps workflows

Runbooks

Incident response

Post-mortems

Prometheus

Grafana

Tools

Terraform

Helm

Flux CD

ArgoCD

VictoriaMetrics

Prometheus

Loki

ELK

Grafana

Job description

ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting‑edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

THE ROLE

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Baseten, you'll define and codify the gold standards of day 2 operations for our ML infrastructure platform. You'll envision and build robust systems, processes, automations, and observability tooling that keep our platform reliable at scale — and that empower the broader organization to operate confidently.

You'll work closely with engineering, forward‑deployed and product teams: learning from recurring failure patterns, turning tribal knowledge into automated mitigations, and raising the operational floor for the entire company.

EXAMPLE INITIATIVES

You'll work on projects like these as part of the SRE team:

• Improve Baseten SRE Practices, by instrumenting SLOs and SLIs, improving alerting and observability for all services.
• Building AI‑assisted tooling for incident triage and response.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own the reliability of Baseten's multi‑cloud Kubernetes infrastructure, including incident response, post‑mortems, and remediation tracking.
• Build and maintain observability infrastructure — metrics, logging, dashboards, and alerting — as code.
• Author, validate, and improve runbooks for recurring failure patterns, ensuring they're structured for low‑context, safe execution.
• Identify high‑frequency failure patterns and convert them into automated mitigations or self‑healing automations.
• Diagnose and resolve runtime issues related to latency, memory behavior, GPU utilization, concurrency, and model lifecycle management.
• Define and instrument SLOs and SLIs across customer workloads and internal services.
• Navigate ambiguity, make principled tradeoffs, and avoid unnecessary complexity in the systems you build and the processes you define.

REQUIREMENTS

• Extensive hands‑on experience with Kubernetes (multi‑cloud experience across EKS, GKE, or similar is a strong plus).
• Experience in building and maintaining scalable infrastructure.
• Strong foundation in observability tooling: metrics (VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus), logging (Loki, ELK), dashboards (Grafana), and alerting pipelines. Observability‑as‑code experience is a plus.
• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, Helm) and GitOps workflows (Flux CD, ArgoCD).
• Experience writing and improving runbooks, leading incident response, and doing post‑mortem analysis.
• Comfort working at the intersection of engineering and operations — you write code, but you also think deeply about process, escalation paths, and operational leverage.
• Familiarity with incident management platforms (incident.io or similar) is a plus.
• No prior ML experience required, but curiosity about how ML models are deployed and served at scale will serve you well.

BENEFITS

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
• (U.S. only) 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
• Paid parental leave
• Fertility and family‑building stipend through Carrot
• (U.S. only) Company-facilitated 401(k)
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).