Staff Engineer, Bare-Metal & Fleet Provisioning

Prime Intellect AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Prime Intellect AI is building the open frontier infrastructure stack. You will own the machine lifecycle from discovery and provisioning through validation, upgrades, repair, and secure reuse, reducing manual work as our fleet grows.

You will automate BIOS, BMC, NIC, and firmware configuration, integrate with SlURM/Kubernetes, and develop hardware inventory and burn-in workflows. This role directly impacts production-scale GPU infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience operating Linux servers or building bare-metal infrastructure automation in production.
• Hands-on experience with PXE/iPXE, DHCP, image provisioning, and out-of-band management such as Redfish or IPMI.
• Strong software engineering and debugging skills in Python, Go, or a comparable language, plus Bash.
• Experience designing reliable automation that handles partial failures, retries, and configuration drift.
• Ability to own operational incidents and collaborate across hardware, networking, and platform teams.

Responsibilities

• Build automated discovery, network boot, OS imaging, and configuration workflows for GPU servers.
• Automate BIOS, BMC, NIC, GPU driver, and firmware configuration with staged rollouts and safe recovery paths.
• Develop hardware inventory and lifecycle services that track machine identity, configuration, health, and readiness.
• Create acceptance tests and burn-in workflows for GPUs, memory, storage, and interconnects before capacity enters production.
• Integrate provisioning and health checks with SLURM, Kubernetes, and compute allocation systems.
• Build observability, quarantine, repair, and re-provisioning workflows; partner with datacenter teams to resolve hardware failures.
• Implement secure credential handling, tenant isolation, and data sanitization across the server lifecycle.

Skills

Linux servers

Bare-metal automation

Python/Go

Bash

Incident ownership

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

PXE/iPXE

Redfish/IPMI

Ansible

Terraform

BMC telemetry

Kubernetes/SLURM

Job description

Prime Intellect AI is building the open frontier infrastructure stack. You will own the machine lifecycle from discovery and provisioning through validation, upgrades, repair, and secure reuse, reducing manual work as our fleet grows.

You will automate BIOS, BMC, NIC, and firmware configuration, integrate with SlURM/Kubernetes, and develop hardware inventory and burn-in workflows. This role directly impacts production-scale GPU infrastructure.