Staff Systems Infrastructure Engineer (PhD)

Engg; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Fireworks AI seeks a highly skilled Member of Technical Staff to design and operate infrastructure for large-scale training and inference. You will design schedulers, storage, and networking to keep tens of thousands of accelerators busy with low inference latency.

You will benchmark, trace, and simulate system behavior, identify bottlenecks end-to-end, and turn research into robust production systems. Collaboration with research and inference teams is essential, with exposure to new hardware

Qualifications

• PhD completed within the last 6 months, or expected completion by December 2026, in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a similar field
• Research background in one or more of: distributed systems, operating systems, scheduling and resource management, storage systems, computer networks, computer architecture, or high-performance computing
• Depth in at least one of the three focus areas above, demonstrated through your dissertation, publications, or systems you've built
• Strong systems programming skills in C/C++, Rust, Go, or a similar language, plus working proficiency in Python
• Experience building and evaluating real systems — not only simulation — and reasoning rigorously about performance with measurements
• Ability to communicate systems design and results clearly to audiences with different backgrounds

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core infrastructure systems for large-scale training and inference
• Model and measure system behavior — build the benchmarks, traces, and simulators needed to reason about scheduling, caching, and network performance before committing to a design
• Identify bottlenecks across the stack, from kernel and driver to scheduler policy, and drive them out with data
• Turn research ideas into production systems that hold up under real workloads, real failures, and real customers
• Work closely with the research and inference teams so that infrastructure design and model design inform each other
• Contribute to the team's technical direction by tracking emerging hardware, interconnects, and systems research

Skills

C/C++

Rust

Go

Python

Distributed systems

Performance profiling

Kubernetes

System design

Education

PhD in CS/CE/EE

Tools

Kubernetes

NCCL

CUDA

Slurm

Ray

DPDK/SPDK

Ceph

Job description

Fireworks AI seeks a highly skilled Member of Technical Staff to design and operate infrastructure for large-scale training and inference. You will design schedulers, storage, and networking to keep tens of thousands of accelerators busy with low inference latency.

You will benchmark, trace, and simulate system behavior, identify bottlenecks end-to-end, and turn research into robust production systems. Collaboration with research and inference teams is essential, with exposure to new hardware