Staff Software Engineer, Inference Platform

Cerebras Cerebras · Semiconductors · Headquarters +1 · Software

Staff Software Engineer for Cerebras' Inference Platform team, focusing on the orchestration layer for datacenter clusters. Responsibilities include platform direction, reliability, performance, execution on critical paths, production leadership, and technical influence. Requires 8+ years of experience in distributed systems, Kubernetes, and backend languages, with a plus for ML inference infrastructure experience.

What you'd actually do

  1. Platform Direction. Help shape the technical direction for the Inference Platform, k8s custom resource definitions , failure domains, service boundaries, and system evolution over time, and own the roadmap for major technical areas.
  2. Reliability & Performance. Architect active-active systems with rapid failover, graceful degradation, and clear SLOs. Drive system-level improvements in latency, throughput, capacity efficiency, and resilience under unpredictable demand.
  3. Execution on Critical Paths. Write and review production code in the most important parts of the platform. Make high-consequence architectural decisions within your area and set the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, and sound engineering judgment.
  4. Production Leadership. Lead on the hardest production issues and cross-system bottlenecks. Drive observability, incident response, capacity planning, and post-incident improvement with a high standard for operational rigor.
  5. Technical Influence. Partner with ML, Product, Infrastructure, and Cloud teams to translate product and business requirements into scalable system designs, and drive alignment on shared technical decisions within your domain and adjacent platform surfaces.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of experience in software engineering
  • substantial individual contributor experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud infrastructure
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture
  • kubernetes
  • Strong track record of making sound architectural decisions for highly available, latency-sensitive systems at scale
  • Experience with security (certificates, TLS, mTLS)
  • Experience optimizing latency, throughput, and efficiency in high-QPS systems
  • Strong proficiency in backend or systems languages such as Go, C++
  • Experience designing observability and reliability practices, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, incident response, and SLO-driven operations
  • Ability to influence senior engineers and cross-functional partners through technical credibility, communication, and judgment

Nice to have

  • Experience with TTFT and tail-latency reduction
  • Experience with ML inference infrastructure, model serving systems, or GPU-accelerated workloads

What the JD emphasized

  • fastest Generative AI inference solution
  • fastest Generative AI inference solution
  • latency-sensitive systems
  • high-QPS systems
  • TTFT and tail-latency reduction

Other signals

  • fastest Generative AI inference solution
  • orchestration layer that runs inference on our datacenter clusters
  • next-generation architecture of a globally distributed inference platform