Director of AI Infrastructure

External

Thealleninstitute · Seattle, WA

$176K–$265K/yrFull-timeOn-site1w ago

AWSDesign SystemsGCPKubernetesLeadershipLinux

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About the role

Ai2 is a non-profit research institute at the forefront of open-source AI development. Unlike industry peers, our goal is to share our findings, data, code, and models with the global scientific community. We are seeking a Director of AI Infrastructure to oversee the systems that power our research. This leader will be responsible for the full lifecycle of our high-performance computing (HPC) environment which includes on-prem GPU clusters and the software orchestration layer that schedules workloads across a hybrid cloud environment.

Requirements

Systems Expert: You have a deep understanding of the Linux kernel, container runtimes, and distributed systems. You understand the performance implications of InfiniBand topologies and NCCL optimizations.

Strategic Thinker: You look beyond the immediate "fire" to design systems that will scale for the next 3-5 years of AI research.

Pragmatic Leader: You are comfortable making trade-offs between technical elegance and operational necessity. You prioritize reliability and researcher velocity above all else.

Your Next Challenge:

The essential functions include, but are not limited to the following:

Cluster Management: Oversee the availability and performance of dense on-prem GPU clusters. You will partner with hardware vendors and internal teams to ensure our physical infrastructure meets the demands of frontier model training.

Orchestration & Scheduling: Direct the strategy for Beaker , our internal orchestration platform. Your goal is to optimize job scheduling, ensuring high utilization of both on-prem assets and elastic cloud resources (AWS/GCP).

Storage Architecture: Develop and execute a long-term roadmap for storage that balances high-throughput performance for active training with cost-effective durability for petascale research data.

Resource Economics: Act as the primary steward of our GPU compute budget. You will make data-driven decisions on when to burst to the cloud versus when to invest in on-prem capacity.

User Support & Velocity: Serve as the technical bridge to our research teams. You will ensure that infrastructure is an accelerator, not a bottleneck, for a diverse set of research objectives.

Experience: 12+ years in infrastructure, systems engineering, or HPC, with at least 5 years in a leadership role managing multi-disciplinary engineering teams.

Bachelor's degree in related field ; relevant advanced degree may substitute for equivalent years of technical work experience

GPU/HPC Stack: Direct experience managing large-scale NVIDIA GPU clusters and high-performance networking (InfiniBand/RoCE).

Cloud Native: Strong background in Kubernetes, Slurm, or similar orchestration frameworks, particularly in hybrid-cloud configurations.

Storage Mastery: Experience with distributed filesystems (e.g., WEKA, Ceph, Lustre) and cloud storage integration at scale.

Software Development: Proficient in Go or Python, with the ability to review architecture and code for our internal tooling.

Physical Demands and Work Environment:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by a team member to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the functions.

Must be able to remain in a stationary position for long periods of time.

The ability to communicate information and ideas so others will understand. Must be able to exchange accurate information in these situations.

The ability to observe details at close range.

Can work under deadlines.

A Little More About Ai2:

In addition to Ai2's core mission, we also aim to contribute to humanity through our treatment of each member of the Ai2 Team. Some highlights are:

We value diversity - We seek to hire, support, and promote people from all genders, ethnicities, and all levels of experi

Director of AI Infrastructure

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