Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, GPU Cluster Infrastructure)

Perplexity is building a dedicated platform team to own the GPU infrastructure behind its AI inference and training workloads. The role will develop and operate a unified, self-serve compute platform across cloud providers, including GPU fleet provisioning, scheduling, Kubernetes orchestration, reliability, and observability.

Responsibilities:

• Build a self-serve compute platform. Design and own the systems that let inference engineers and researchers launch training jobs and operate inference services without managing GPU provisioning, cluster configuration, or provider-specific infrastructure
• Operate the GPU fleet. Own provisioning, lifecycle management, reliability, and capacity integration across providers, giving teams a consistent way to use compute regardless of where it runs
• Solve for GPU scarcity. Build the scheduling and placement logic that finds available capacity across providers, packs it efficiently, and gets the right workload onto the right hardware under real constraints
• Support two very different workloads. Keep long-running distributed training jobs healthy while simultaneously guaranteeing the availability and latency of production inference services on the same fleet
• Own the Kubernetes for GPU orchestration. Write the operators and CRDs, and manage many clusters across providers so the platform behaves the same everywhere we run
• Make failure boring. Build the fault tolerance, autoscaling, and observability that keep the fleet utilized and let workloads survive node loss, provider hiccups, and capacity shifts without human intervention
• Set technical direction across teams. Partner with inference and cloud infrastructure engineers to turn operational constraints into a coherent platform architecture and roadmap

Requirements:

• Deep Kubernetes experience — custom operators, CRDs, and multi-cluster federation, not just running kubectl apply
• You've managed GPU clusters at scale: NVIDIA hardware, CUDA, and the networking that makes them fast (InfiniBand or RoCE)
• You've orchestrated compute across multiple clouds (CoreWeave, AWS, GCP, or similar) and understand how different each one really is
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals: scheduling, resource allocation, and fault tolerance under load
• You write infrastructure and systems-level code in Go, Rust or C++
• You've supported both long-running training jobs and high-availability inference services, and you know why they pull infrastructure in opposite directions
• You own problems end-to-end and do well when the path forward isn't laid out for you
• Inference serving stacks: vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM
• Slurm or other HPC schedulers
• GPU kernel work in CUDA or Triton — not required, but notable
• High-speed interconnects: InfiniBand, RoCE, or RDMA in production
• Observability for ML workloads: Prometheus, Grafana, or Weights & Biases