Staff Software Engineer, Inference Platform

Cerebras; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Cerebras is seeking a Staff Engineer to join their Inference Platform team in Sunnyvale, California. This role involves leading and contributing to projects focused on cloud and ML components, with responsibilities spanning design, mentoring, and coding.

The ideal candidate will have over 8 years of experience in software engineering, particularly in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure. This hands-on leadership position offers a chance to shape the future of a globally distributed architecture.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with large-scale systems.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture ideally with Kubernetes.
• Strong proficiency in backend or systems languages such as Go, C++.

Responsibilities

• Raise the effectiveness of senior engineers through feedback and technical standards.
• Help shape the technical direction for the Inference Platform.
• Architect active-active systems with rapid failover and clear SLOs.
• Lead on critical production issues and cross-system bottlenecks.

Skills

Software engineering experience

Distributed systems architecture

Kubernetes expertise

Security practices

Backend languages (Go, C++)

Observability practices

Job description

Location: Sunnyvale

We're hiring a Staff Engineer to help lead, drive, and contribute to projects on our Inference Platform team. Our team primarily owns the orchestration layer that runs inference on our datacenter clusters which glues together the cloud components to the ML components. We are often the first team to face issues that haven’t been solved yet so we get to lead the company on a wide variety of solutions, from k8s operators to security policies of services and CI/CD.

This is a hands‑on TL role for an engineer who will split their time between design, mentoring, and coding and should be experienced in all facets of development including; testing, continuous development, observability, security, networking, debugging, productionization.

If you’re interested in building our next‑generation architecture of a globally distributed inference platform, we’d like to talk.

Responsibilities

• Raise the effectiveness of senior engineers through design feedback, pairing, and clear technical standards.
• Platform Direction. Help shape the technical direction for the Inference Platform, k8s custom resource definitions , failure domains, service boundaries, and system evolution over time, and own the roadmap for major technical areas.
• Reliability & Performance. Architect active‑active systems with rapid failover, graceful degradation, and clear SLOs. Drive system‑level improvements in latency, throughput, capacity efficiency, and resilience under unpredictable demand.
• Execution on Critical Paths. Write and review production code in the most important parts of the platform. Make high‑consequence architectural decisions within your area and set the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, and sound engineering judgment.
• Production Leadership. Lead on the hardest production issues and cross‑system bottlenecks. Drive observability, incident response, capacity planning, and post‑incident improvement with a high standard for operational rigor.
• Technical Influence. Partner with ML, Product, Infrastructure, and Cloud teams to translate product and business requirements into scalable system designs, and drive alignment on shared technical decisions within your domain and adjacent platform surfaces.

Skills & Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with substantial individual contributor experience building and operating large‑scale distributed systems or cloud infrastructure.
• 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. Experience with TTFT and tail‑latency reduction is a strong plus.
• Strong proficiency in backend or systems languages such as Go, 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, especially within your domain and adjacent systems.
• Experience with ML inference infrastructure, model serving systems, or GPU‑accelerated workloads is a plus.

Cerebras Systems is committed to creating an equal and diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe inclusive teams build better products and companies. We try every day to build a work environment that empowers people to do their best work through continuous learning, growth and support of those around them.