Jobs in United States

Distributed Systems Engineer in San Francisco

130 active opportunities · Updated October 2026

Explore current distributed systems engineer jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time· Remote
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend +8.1%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

🚀 About WRITER WRITER is where the world's leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And we're proving it's possible – through powerful, trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITER's end-to-end platform, hundreds of companies like Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their company's data and fueled by WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI. Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and London, our team thinks big and moves fast, and we're looking for smart, hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI. 📐 About the role Join WRITER's security team as a staff detection and response engineer and help protect the AI infrastructure that's transforming how the world works. You'll build sophisticated detection systems that identify attacks targeting our AI platform, training data, and model deployments while creating automated response capabilities that scale with our explosive growth. This isn't just traditional security work – you're defending cutting-edge AI/AGI systems against adversaries who are evolving their tactics as fast as AI itself advances. This role combines hands-on security engineering with strategic thinking to stay ahead of novel threats that don't exist in textbooks yet. You'll be the operational arm of our security function, translating threat intelligence into real-time detections, coordinating incident response across multiple teams, and hunting for sophisticated attacks across GPU clusters and distributed training environments. If you're excited by the challen

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time· Remote
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -86%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

Who We Are Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together . We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. About the Role: Notion’s Data Foundations team builds and operates the batch and streaming infrastructure behind our product features, analytics, search, and AI experiences. We’re looking for a hands-on technical leader to shape the next generation of this platform as Notion serves larger customers, expands globally, and supports more data-intensive products. You’ll identify the highest-leverage problems, set direction, build and develop a high-performing team, and lead multi-quarter initiatives across our data lake, streaming, distributed-compute, governance, and reliability systems. You’ll stay close to critical technical decisions while creating clear ownership, growing engineers and technical leaders, and helping the team execute as one—partnering closely with Data Engineering, Data Product, Search, AI, Infrastructure, and Security. This role can be based in either San Francisco or New York City. We work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays (our Anchor Days) because we do our best thinking and building together in person. We’re looking for someone who’s excited to work alongside the team during those days. What You

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time· Remote
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend +8.1%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

🚀 About WRITER WRITER is where the world's leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And we're proving it's possible – through powerful, trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITER's end-to-end platform, hundreds of companies like Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their company's data and fueled by WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI. Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and London, our team thinks big and moves fast, and we're looking for smart, hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI. 📐 About the role Join WRITER's security team as a staff detection and response engineer and help protect the AI infrastructure that's transforming how the world works. You'll build sophisticated detection systems that identify attacks targeting our AI platform, training data, and model deployments while creating automated response capabilities that scale with our explosive growth. This isn't just traditional security work – you're defending cutting-edge AI/AGI systems against adversaries who are evolving their tactics as fast as AI itself advances. This role combines hands-on security engineering with strategic thinking to stay ahead of novel threats that don't exist in textbooks yet. You'll be the operational arm of our security function, translating threat intelligence into real-time detections, coordinating incident response across multiple teams, and hunting for sophisticated attacks across GPU clusters and distributed training environments. If you're excited by the challen

PythonRestAIGo
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -79.1%

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. We are looking for an engineer with strong experience in machine learning and solid foundations in maths and computer science to join our growing Post-Training team at Baseten. Custom models are instrumental to the success of Baseten customers. By inference volume, the overwhelming majority of traffic at Baseten is to and from models that have been post-trained in some way, whether that be through reinforcement learning, supervised finetuning, a recent technique from the literature, or an in-house research technique from Baseten. The Post-Training team is responsible for the success of our customers’ post-trained models, and we employ a wide array of techniques to produce models that are more efficient and higher quality than even the biggest closed source models for the customer’s specific needs. Your role as a research engineer is to build the in-house tooling to support all of this. We care about training a wide spectrum of different model architectures with a variety of techniques efficiently and at scale. At times this involves zooming deep into a particular technical topic, but more often if involves working across the stack as a whole - systems-level concepts like Kubernetes, cgroups, storage systems, and networking topologies, as well as PyTorch distributed tensor computation, and GPU kernels. RECENT RESEARCH Dense, on-policy or both? Repeated kv cache for long-running agents Distillation without the dark – rep

KubernetesMachine LearningAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend +8.1%

🚀 About WRITER WRITER is where the world's leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And we're proving it's possible – through powerful, trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITER's end-to-end platform, hundreds of companies like Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their company's data and fueled by WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI. Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and London, our team thinks big and moves fast, and we're looking for smart, hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI. 📐 About the role Join WRITER's security team as a staff detection and response engineer and help protect the AI infrastructure that's transforming how the world works. You'll build sophisticated detection systems that identify attacks targeting our AI platform, training data, and model deployments while creating automated response capabilities that scale with our explosive growth. This isn't just traditional security work – you're defending cutting-edge AI/AGI systems against adversaries who are evolving their tactics as fast as AI itself advances. This role combines hands-on security engineering with strategic thinking to stay ahead of novel threats that don't exist in textbooks yet. You'll be the operational arm of our security function, translating threat intelligence into real-time detections, coordinating incident response across multiple teams, and hunting for sophisticated attacks across GPU clusters and distributed training environments. If you're excited by the challen

PythonRestAIGo
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The ChatGPT Model Flywheel team unified goal is to transform model advancements into great ChatGPT user experiences through reliable serving, rapid experimentation, safe deployment, and continuous improvement. Team Focus Areas Model Experimentation: Enable rapid, safe model validation for ChatGPT and Codex products through experiment automation and lifecycle management. Model Deployment: Ensure safe, scalable deployment of model capabilities with robust rollout and operational tooling. Automate capacity management and incorporate platform-wide health monitors. Model Measurement: Build comprehensive evaluation and measurement systems for model quality, from user signals to launch scorecards. Improve end-to-end feedback loops for continual model improvement. Key Partnerships Collaborate cross-functionally with teams including Model Measurement DS, Research, Codex, Fleet, Inference, and API. In this role, you will: Elevate and consolidate ChatGPT’s harness, context management, and system prompt frameworks. Drive expansion and improvement of multi-tier model experiences. Support and scale self-serve experiment capabilities and automated guardrails. Lead model rollout automation, capacity management, and health monitoring. Shape end-to-end measurement systems (evals, grader signals, user feedback, etc.). You might thrive in this role if you have: Proven experience leading engineering teams in complex, cross-functional environments. Demonstrated success shipping production systems at scale (ideally for AI or large backend services). Deep understanding of model-driven product development, deployment lifecycle, and measurement tooling. Excellent communication and collaboration skills—experience interfacing directly with engineering, research, and product stakeholders. Prior involvement with large language models, distributed infrastructure, or experimentation platforms is a plus. Why Work With Us Tackle highly impactful technical challenges at the cutting edg

AWSRestAIGo
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Post-Training Frontiers team is responsible for training the frontier agents OpenAI ships to the world (GPT-Next). We train the flagship agentic models behind Codex, ChatGPT, and the API through large-scale reinforcement learning. The team’s work spans four areas. First, execution and science: working with teams across OpenAI to decide what can go into the final model and how, using scientific experiments and evals that are representative of the final pipeline so issues can be recognized early. Second, RL scaling: executing the final large-scale reinforcement learning run, making sure GPUs are used efficiently and training stays healthy. Third, research: improving horizontal capabilities like instruction following, factuality, memory, and multi-agent behavior, where the team’s broad visibility helps identify cross-cutting improvements across teams and domains. Fourth, engineering: maintaining the infrastructure stack and internal tools to ensure that both the final run and all integrations go as smoothly as possible and that the systems are easy to work with. About the Role This role focuses on keeping our frontier RL training runs fast, reliable, and unblocked. You will work across engineering and infrastructure problems as they emerge, from scaling and orchestration issues to inference bottlenecks, numerical problems, and hardware failures, as well as supporting large horizontal integrations in the big run, like multi-agent capabilities or memory. This is a role for a strong generalist who quickly learns anything needed for the task, has high attention to detail, debugs deeply, and is motivated by fixing the highest-impact problem in front of the team. In this role, you will: Keep large-scale async RL training runs moving by jumping into the most urgent engineering and infrastructure problems. Debug issues across training systems, inference, orchestration, scaling, and distributed infrastructure. Improve the reliability and efficiency of RL trai

AWSRestAIGo
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Workload Networking team is responsible for the collective communication stack used in our largest training jobs. Using a combination of C++ and CUDA we work on novel collective communication techniques that enable efficient training of our flagship models on our largest custom built supercomputers. The models we train are key ingredients to the AI research progress at OpenAI and the field as a whole, and we continually incorporate learnings from our entire research org into our training platform. About the Role As a Software Engineer, Networking you will design and implement custom networking collectives that are tightly integrated into our training stack. We’re looking for people who have a background in low level performance critical software. Experience with collective communication is a bonus. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Collaborate closely with ML researchers to design and implement efficient collective operations in C++ and CUDA. Ensure that our largest training jobs take full advantage of the different network transports used in our supercomputers. Work on simulations to inform our future supercomputer network designs. You might thrive in this role if you: Have written distributed algorithms using RDMA in the past. Are comfortable writing low level performance sensitive CPU and/or GPU code. Are familiar with network simulation techniques. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voic

AWSRestAIC++
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -67.9%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

About Us: AI needs a new infrastructure layer. We're building it at Modal. Every era of computing brought new workloads that previous infrastructure couldn't support: mainframes, databases, and the cloud. Each time, the company that rebuilt the layer underneath defined the decade. AI is no different, except it touches everything instead of one slice, and the window to build the layer underneath it is open right now. Our customers include category-defining companies like Lovable , Ramp , Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno. They rely on Modal for instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage, so it's simple to serve low-latency inference, fine-tune models, and access production-ready sandboxes at scale. We recently raised a $355M Series C at a $4.65B valuation, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures. We've crossed $300M+ ARR and grown fivefold since September. Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g., Seaborn , Luig i ), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience. The Role: We are looking for strong engineers with experience and interest in designing, building, and maintaining the novel, high-performance systems that make up our serverless platform. Specifically, you'll be working on the distributed object storage system that underpins every container image, volume, and checkpoint on Modal: hundreds of petabytes of data, replicated across multiple cloud object stores and a CDN, cached on local NVMe across a large fleet of workers in many datacenters, and shared peer-to-peer within each datacenter. You'll make cold starts feel local when the data is hundreds of milliseconds away, designing the caching, preloading, and peer-to-peer layers that hide object-store latency and keep public ingress off saturated uplinks. You'll own durability and cost at petabyte scale, from streaming and batch replication between origins, to garbage collecti

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -67.9%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

About Us: AI needs a new infrastructure layer. We're building it at Modal. Every era of computing brought new workloads that previous infrastructure couldn't support: mainframes, databases, and the cloud. Each time, the company that rebuilt the layer underneath defined the decade. AI is no different, except it touches everything instead of one slice, and the window to build the layer underneath it is open right now. Our customers include category-defining companies like Lovable , Ramp , Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno. They rely on Modal for instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage, so it's simple to serve low-latency inference, fine-tune models, and access production-ready sandboxes at scale. We recently raised a $355M Series C at a $4.65B valuation, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures. We've crossed $300M+ ARR and grown fivefold since September. Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g., Seaborn , Luig i ), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience. The Role: We are looking for a strong technical lead to guide the engineers designing, building, and maintaining the novel, high-performance systems that make up our serverless platform. You'll lead the team responsible for the distributed object storage system that underpins every container image, volume, and checkpoint on Modal: hundreds of petabytes of data, replicated across multiple cloud object stores and a CDN, cached on local NVMe across a large fleet of workers in many datacenters, and shared peer-to-peer within each datacenter. You'll set technical direction for the primitives that other teams (filesystems, training, sandboxes) build on, balancing durability, latency, throughput, and cost. You'll own the roadmap from today's hardest problems (garbage collection at petabyte scale, active-active replication, rate limiting that protects the upstream without wasting ut

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time· Remote
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -79.2%

Who are we? Cohere is the leading security-first enterprise AI company. We build cutting-edge foundation AI models and end-to-end products that are designed to solve real-world business problems. We’re training and deploying frontier models for enterprises who are building AI systems. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI and we are looking for folks that want to be part of that. We obsess over what we build. Each one of us is responsible for contributing to increasing the capabilities of our models and the value they drive for our customers. Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are all passionate about their craft. We are a global technology company headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul. Join us! Why This Role? We're hiring a People Project Manager to join our HR PMO and help deliver an ambitious portfolio of HR programs, products, and initiatives as we scale globally. This is not a business-as-usual project management role . We're a hypergrowth company building at speed, and our HR team is building alongside it. We're looking for someone who gets genuine energy from bringing order to chaos, creating structure where there isn't any yet, and getting important things shipped. Hypergrowth, for real. Things move fast, priorities evolve, and there's always something meaningful to jump into. If you love pace, variety, and figuring things out as you go, you'll have a huge canvas here. A chance to build. Our HR PMO is taking shape within a hugely ambitious HR team. You'll help create the workflows, rhythms, and tools we need to build a world-class function at scale. Real ownership. Take projects from idea to delivery — creating structure, driving actions, managing dependencies, and keeping teams moving. Global from day one. Work across our distributed HR team and with stakeholders around the world. You'll thrive if you: Create o

GitAIGoExcel
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -79.1%

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 We're looking for a Customer Marketing Manager who can own the full customer evidence motion at Baseten: building the systems that capture customer stories, running the co-marketing programs that amplify them, and developing the channels and assets that get those stories in front of the right people. Our customers are ML engineers and AI teams deploying serious workloads — and the stories they tell about what they've built matter. We've earned trust with some of the most demanding technical teams in the industry, and this role exists to turn that trust into evidence. RESPONSIBILITIES Co-Marketing Execution Serve as the DRI for every customer co-marketing launch end to end — managing timelines, coordinating internal and external stakeholders, and driving the process from first outreach to final publication Own the single source of truth for what's in flight across all customer co-marketing activity Coordinate with design, social, and sales to ensure every asset is built, approved, and distributed correctly Customer Evidence & Asset Library Own the customer evidence library: written case studies, video stories, customer quote repository, logo library, and sales snippets ensuring all assets stay current and are tagged and accessible for sales and marketing use Run the monthly operating rhythm: new logo additions from closed-won opportunities, asset updates, and customer health checks Programs & Channels I

Machine LearningAIGoRust
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -79.2%

Who are we? Cohere is the leading security-first enterprise AI company. We build cutting-edge foundation AI models and end-to-end products that are designed to solve real-world business problems. We’re training and deploying frontier models for enterprises who are building AI systems. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI and we are looking for folks that want to be part of that. We obsess over what we build. Each one of us is responsible for contributing to increasing the capabilities of our models and the value they drive for our customers. Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are all passionate about their craft. We are a global technology company headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul. Join us! As the Senior Director of Solutions Architecture for the Americas at Cohere, you will own the US and Canada commercial Solutions Architecture function. You will lead the team that turns enterprise interest in agentic AI into deployed, production systems, and you will be accountable for the technical win in the most competitive AI market in the world. The United States and Canada are our largest commercial opportunity, and this seat owns how we win them. You will take an established, distributed team of strong technical people and raise what it can do — setting the bar and establishing the operating rhythm that lets a team of generalists run consistent, industry-fluent plays at enterprise scale. You will set direction for the function, sit on the Solution Architecture leadership team alongside the regional leaders for EMEA and Asia Pacific, and contribute to company-wide decisions with your peers across Sales, Product and Engineering. In this role, you will: Lead and Scale the Organization: Build, coach and develop a high-performing Solutions Architecture organization across the US and Canada, and grow the senior technical talent

GitRestAIGo
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Future of Computing Research team is an applied research team in the Consumer Devices group focused on developing new methods and models to support our vision as we advance forward in our mission of building AGI that benefits all of humanity. About the Role As a Technical Lead on the Future of Computing Research team, you will work together with both the best ML researchers in the world and the greatest design talent of our generation to push the frontier of model capabilities. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We follow a hybrid model with 3 days a week in the office and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Evaluate and select silicon platforms (GPUs, NPUs, and specialized accelerators) for on-device and edge deployment of OpenAI models. Work closely with research teams to co-design model architectures that meet real-world deployment constraints such as latency, memory, power, and bandwidth. Analyze and model system performance, identifying tradeoffs between model design, memory hierarchy, compute throughput, and hardware capabilities. Partner with hardware vendors and internal infrastructure teams to bring up new accelerators and ensure efficient execution of transformer workloads. Build and lead a team of engineers responsible for implementing the low-level inference stack, including kernel development and runtime systems. Run through the necessary walls to take nascent research capabilities and turn them into capabilities we can build on top of. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience evaluating or deploying workloads on GPUs, NPUs, or other specialized accelerators. Understand the performance characteristics of transformer models, including attention, KV-cache behavior, and memory bandwidth requirements. Have designed or optimized high-performance compute systems, such as inference engines, distributed runtimes, or hardware-aware ML pipelines. Have experience building or leading teams work

AWSRestAIRust
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops system and infrastructure solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. We work closely with architecture, infrastructure, and vendor teams to evaluate system performance and guide critical design decisions. Our team focuses on building and applying performance modeling frameworks to understand system behavior, quantify tradeoffs, and inform next-generation infrastructure design. About the Role We are seeking Performance Modeling Engineers to develop and apply modeling tools that evaluate AI system performance and inform architectural decisions. In this role, you will work closely with the Performance Modeling Lead and partner teams to analyze system behavior, run simulations or analytical models, and help quantify tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, and storage. You will contribute to building modeling frameworks and applying them to real-world questions that impact system design and vendor decisions. This role is well-suited for engineers with strong software or modeling backgrounds who are interested in developing deeper expertise in system architecture and AI infrastructure. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance. Key Responsibilities Develop and maintain performance modeling tools and frameworks. Build models to evaluate system behavior across: compute, memory, and interconnect subsystems distributed system scaling and bottlenecks. Run simulations and analytical models to support architectural tradeoff analysis. Collaborate with performance modeling lead and system architects to answer forward-looking design questions. Analyze and interpret modeling outputs, translating results into actionable insights. Validate models against real system measurements and workload behavior. Contribute to improving modeling fidelity, usability, and scalability. Qualifications Strong software engineeri

AWSRestAIRust
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