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Senior Systems Engineer - AI Infrastructure

External
clockworksystems logoClockworksystems · Palo Alto
$150K–$230K/yrFull-timeOn-site1mo ago
ObservabilityPyTorch
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About the role

We're building infrastructure for fault-tolerant, high-performance distributed GPU training. You'll work at the intersection of GPU systems, high-speed networking, and distributed coordination-designing and implementing systems that run at scale. This is a systems building role. You'll dig into internals, understand why things break under pressure, and design solutions that handle the messy reality of distributed systems.

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement low-level systems software for GPU clusters
  • Work with internals of frameworks like PyTorch, NCCL, CUDA runtime-not as a user, but modifying and extending them
  • Build components that make large-scale GPU training more reliable and efficient
  • Debug complex distributed/concurrent systems where failures are subtle and non-deterministic
  • Own systems end-to-end: from design through production

Requirements

  • Required: Systems building experience
  • You've designed and built complex systems-not just deployed or operated them. Examples:
  • Kernel subsystems, device drivers, or OS-level components
  • Distributed storage, databases, or coordination systems
  • Runtimes, profilers, or performance tooling
  • Network stacks, protocols, or high-performance I/O systems
  • Large-scale infrastructure at the systems layer
  • Core technical skills:
  • Strong C/C++ in systems contexts (not just application code)
  • Deep understanding of concurrency, memory models, and failure modes
  • Experience reasoning about distributed system behavior: consistency, ordering, partial failures
  • Comfortable reading and modifying large, unfamiliar codebases
  • GPU programming (CUDA) or GPU systems experience
  • High-performance networking (RDMA, InfiniBand)
  • ML framework or runtime internals
  • Cluster scheduling or orchestration systems
  • We believe strong systems engineers pick up domain-specific tools quickly. We value your ability to reason about complex systems over checkbox familiarity with our specific stack.
  • Senior Expectations
  • Lead design of significant system components
  • Navigate ambiguity and define technical direction
  • Mentor engineers and raise team capabilities
  • 8+ years building systems software
  • Enjoy
  • Challenging projects.
  • A friendly and inclusive workplace culture.
  • Competitive compensation.
  • A great benefits package.
  • Catered lunch.

Benefits

Vision insuranceEquity / stock options

Additional Information

About Clockwork Systems Clockwork.io - Software Driven Fabrics to increase GPU cluster utilization Clockwork Systems was founded by Stanford researchers and veteran systems engineers who share a vision for redefining the foundations of distributed computing. As AI workloads grow increasingly complex, traditional infrastructure struggles to meet the demands of performance, reliability, and precise coordination. Clockwork is pioneering a software-driven approach to AI fabrics by delivering cross-stack observability to catch and quickly resolve problems, workload fault tolerance to keep jobs running through failures, and performance acceleration that dynamically routes and paces traffic to avoid congestion. To learn more, visit www.clockwork.io .


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