ABOUT BASETEN
Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products.
THE ROLE
As a Site Reliability Engineer at Baseten, you'll define and codify the gold standards of day 2 operations for our ML infrastructure platform. You'll envision and build robust systems, processes, automations, and observability tooling that keep our platform reliable at scale — and that empower the broader organization to operate confidently.
You'll work closely with engineering, forward-deployed and product teams: learning from recurring failure patterns, turning tribal knowledge into automated mitigations, and raising the operational floor for the entire company.
EXAMPLE INITIATIVES
You'll work on projects like these as part of the SRE team:
Improve Baseten SRE Practices, by instrumenting SLOs and SLIs, improving alerting and observability for all services.
Building AI-assisted tooling for incident triage and response.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Own the reliability of Baseten's multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure, including incident response, post-mortems, and remediation tracking.
Build and maintain observability infrastructure — metrics, logging, dashboards, and alerting — as code.
Author, validate, and improve runbooks for recurring failure patterns, ensuring they're structured for low-context, safe execution.
Identify high-frequency failure patterns and convert them into automated mitigations or self-healing automations.
Diagnose and resolve runtime issues related to latency, memory behavior, GPU utilization, concurrency, and model lifecycle management.
Define and instrument SLOs and SLIs across customer workloads and internal services.
Navigate ambiguity, make principled tradeoffs, and avoid unnecessary complexity in the systems you build and the processes you define.
REQUIREMENTS
Extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes (multi-cloud experience across EKS, GKE, or similar is a strong plus).
Experience in building and maintaining scalable infrastructure.
Strong foundation in observability tooling: metrics (VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus), logging (Loki, ELK), dashboards (Grafana), and alerting pipelines. Observability-as-code experience is a plus.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm) and GitOps workflows (Flux CD, ArgoCD).
Experience writing and improving runbooks, leading incident response, and doing post-mortem analysis.
Comfort working at the intersection of engineering and operations — you write code, but you also think deeply about process, escalation paths, and operational leverage.
Familiarity with incident management platforms (incident.io or similar) is a plus.
No prior ML experience required, but curiosity about how ML models are deployed and served at scale will serve you well.
BENEFITS
Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
Paid parental leave
Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
Company-facilitated 401(k)
Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.
Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you.
At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).
Skills Required
- Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. degree in related field
- 3+ years of professional work experience
- Experience in resolving critical user issues
- Familiarity with ML pipeline troubleshooting
- Knowledge of ML model optimization
- Expertise in open-source libraries for ML models
- Ability to analyze user feedback for product development
- Ability to own projects end-to-end
Baseten Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Baseten and has not been reviewed or approved by Baseten.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Feedback suggests pay targets the top of market with explicit ranges in postings and a stated aim to provide 90th percentile salaries with equity. Role descriptions emphasize competitive, experience-based pay bands and meaningful stock grants.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare is described as fully covered for medical, dental, and vision for employees and their families, reducing out-of-pocket costs. This comprehensive coverage is consistently highlighted alongside other core benefits.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off policies include unlimited PTO with a minimum expectation of at least four weeks, 16 paid company holidays, and a company-wide winter break. These elements indicate substantial protected time away from work.
Baseten Insights
What We Do
AI’s future won’t be a few massive models built by a handful of labs. It’ll be millions of specialized models embedded into every product, workflow, and experience by the people closest to the customer. The foundation of that future is inference. Inference determines the performance, reliability, latency, and economics of every AI product. For AI to scale globally, it must be as reliable, fast, cost-effective, and high-quality as possible. That’s why Baseten exists. Companies like Abridge, Cursor, Lovable, Notion, and OpenEvidence depend on Baseten to power mission-critical AI workloads in production.
Why Work With Us
We’re an interdisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and operators building the Inference Cloud our AI future demands. We’re running at a hard systems problem that requires first-principles thinking across the entire stack. The bar is high. We work hard, move fast, and care deeply about quality.
