---
title: 'Principal SRE - AI Inference at Cerebras Systems'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-sre-ai-inference-cerebras-systems-sunnyvale-4dnq36qkrxwg'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-13'
---

# Principal SRE - AI Inference at Cerebras Systems

- **Company:** [Cerebras Systems](https://feeny.ai/companies/cerebras-systems)
- **Location:** Sunnyvale, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-07-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cerebras/1bf0ea92-b0fd-4163-b44c-3564e67b15c1

## Job description

Cerebras Systems builds the world's largest AI chip, 56 times larger than GPUs. This architecture allows Cerebras to deliver industry-leading training and inference speeds; over 10 times faster than GPU-based hyperscale cloud inference services.

This order of magnitude increase in speed is transforming the user experience of AI applications, unlocking real-time iteration and increasing intelligence via additional agentic computation.

Cerebras works with the leading model labs, global enterprises, and cutting-edge AI-native startups. [OpenAI recently announced a multi-year partnership](https://openai.com/index/cerebras-partnership/) with Cerebras, to deploy 750 megawatts of scale, transforming key workloads with ultra high-speed inference.

## About the Role

We are building a high-performance SRE function to support one of the world’s fastest-growing AI inference services, powered by the Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE). This team will help deliver world-class, ultra-reliable inference infrastructure for leading model builders such as OpenAI and other frontier labs. As a Principal SRE, you will define and drive the technical architecture for scaling our inference fleet through self-service delivery, shared observability, capacity orchestration, rollout safety, and operational automation. This role starts with 2–3 weeks of hands-on operational immersion to build deep context on the current stack, production pain points, and high-stakes workflows. From there, your mandate shifts to architecting the “tomorrow” layer: a unified capacity management and production control plane that enables reliable capacity planning, workload placement, rollout safety, validation, and operational decision-making across large-scale inference infrastructure. Success in the first year means core engineering teams, product managers, external customers, and cluster stakeholders can execute critical operational workflows through self-service systems with strong guardrails, clear ownership, and minimal dependency on expert SRE operators. You will collaborate with the tech leads and the leadership team across core, cluster, cloud, and product stakeholders. This work will shift reliability from an ops-only burden to a shared engineering discipline that underpins frontier AI inference at scale. If you are a proven Principal engineer who enjoys turning complexity into elegant reliability at scale, this is your chance to lead this transformation from the front. This role does not require 24/7 on-call rotations.

## Key Responsibilities

- Define and implement a robust strategy for delivering and running software reliably and at scale across multiple datacenters and cloud-based solutions.
- Architect self-service platforms and internal tooling that let product teams, external customers, and cluster operators safely trigger and observe critical workflows with minimal handoffs.
- Define and evolve reliability practices for inference workloads, including SLOs and SLIs for latency, throughput, and accuracy stability; error budgets; blameless postmortems; chaos testing; and capacity forecasting across multi-datacenter and on-prem environments.
- Mentor senior SREs, support critical incident escalations, and use production pain points to prioritize the highest-leverage automation work.
- Measure and drive impact through clear metrics, including toil reduction, deployment velocity, SLO compliance, MTTR, and adoption of self-service workflows.

Required Experience & Skills

- 15+ years in SRE, infrastructure engineering, or platform engineering, with a record of setting technical direction and delivering reliability improvements at large scale in FAANG, hyperscaler, frontier AI, or similarly demanding production environments.
- Deep experience with large-scale compute fleets, internal control planes, schedulers, orchestration systems, capacity management, and reliability automation.
- Experience defining and driving cross-team architecture for production control planes, capacity orchestration, fleet management, or self-service infrastructure platforms with clear operational ownership.
- Strong judgment in converging fragmented workflows, tools, and teams into coherent architectures that improve reliability, efficiency, and operational leverage.
- Ability to lead complex, ambiguous technical programs end to end; influence senior cross-functional stakeholders; mentor senior engineers; and communicate technical strategy clearly.
- Hands-on experience with production observability, incident response, and SLO-based reliability management across metrics, logs, traces, alerting, dashboards, and operational review loops.

Nice-to-Haves

- Experience with Bazel or other large-scale build systems in production.
- Background in AI/ML inference systems, including model serving runtimes, disaggregated inference, GPU orchestration, latency and accuracy SLOs, or drift monitoring.
- Prior work on predictive autoscaling, chaos engineering, or cost-aware capacity management for compute-intensive workloads.

Location

- SF Bay Area
- Toronto

## Why Join Cerebras

People who are serious about software make their own hardware. At Cerebras, we have built a breakthrough architecture that is unlocking new opportunities for the AI industry. With dozens of model releases and rapid growth, we’ve reached an inflection point in our business. Members of our team tell us there are five main reasons they joined Cerebras:

- Build a breakthrough AI platform beyond the constraints of the GPU.
- Publish and open source their cutting-edge AI research.
- Work on one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.
- Enjoy job stability with startup vitality.
- Our simple, non-corporate work culture that respects individual beliefs.

Find out more about what it's like to work at Cerebras [here](https://www.cerebras.ai/join-us)! Apply today and become part of the forefront of groundbreaking advancements in AI! Cerebras Systems is committed to creating an equal and diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe inclusive teams build better products and companies. We try every day to build a work environment that empowers people to do their best work through continuous learning, growth and support of those around them. This website or its third-party tools process personal data. For more details, click [here](https://www.cerebras.net/privacy/) to review our CCPA disclosure notice.

## About Cerebras Systems

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cerebras builds wafer-scale AI chips (the largest semiconductors ever made) and supercomputers that deliver up to 15x faster inference than GPUs, offered both on-premises and via cloud APIs.
- **Entity Type**: Public (NASDAQ: CBRS) — filed for IPO and now listed on the Nasdaq.
- **Headquarters**: Sunnyvale, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie, Jean-Philippe Fricker

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Semiconductor manufacturing, AI computing hardware and software, cloud AI services.
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises, government research labs, cloud service providers, and AI developers.
- **Mission**: “Building impossible technologies so you can too” – accelerating AI through wafer-scale computing.

## Products & Services
- **Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE-3)**: The world’s largest AI chip (215 mm²), 58x larger than a typical GPU, built for ultra‑fast AI training and inference. Manufactured by TSMC.
- **CS-3 Supercomputer**: A single system powered by the WSE-3, delivering record-breaking AI performance for on-premises deployment.
- **Cerebras AI Inference Cloud & Training Cloud**: Pay-as-you‑go APIs that provide drop‑in OpenAI‑compatible access to Cerebras’ hardware for serving, fine‑tuning, and pre‑training models.
- **Condor Galaxy Network**: A series of supercomputers (e.g., CG‑1 with 4 exaFLOPs) built in partnership with G42 for high‑performance AI.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (recently public; market cap data not available in provided sources).
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue of $78.7 M (latest); total funding of $2.7 B across 15 rounds.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: G42, OpenAI (signed in 2026), Amazon Web Services (signed in 2026), Meta (Llama API), Perplexity, Mistral, Hugging Face, OpenRouter.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - 34.3% YoY headcount growth (701 employees).
  - Rapid data center expansion across North America and Europe.
  - Won the HPCwire Readers’ & Editors’ Choice 2025 for Best AI Product/Technology.
  - Named to Forbes America’s Best Startup Employers 2026 and Fast Company Most Innovative Companies 2026 (AI).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Wafer‑scale architecture**: Eliminates interconnect bottlenecks, reducing latency and delivering up to 15x faster inference than GPU clusters.
- **Largest AI chip ever built**: 58x larger than any GPU, enabling massive on‑chip memory (SRAM) and compute density.
- **Full‑stack offering**: Hardware + cloud APIs + on‑prem systems, giving customers deployment flexibility.
- **Strong customer relationships**: Key contracts with OpenAI, AWS, G42, and Mayo Clinic (2024 Gordon Bell Prize work).

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale inference capacity**: Building out data centers to become the world’s #1 provider of high‑speed AI inference.
- **Deepen cloud partnerships**: Expanding pay‑as‑you‑go cloud access and enterprise deployments.
- **Advance wafer‑scale technology**: Continuous R&D on WSE‑3 successors and software stack (compiler, ML workflows).
- **Broaden model support**: Already serving Llama, Gemma, Qwen, Mistral, and more; integrating with Hugging Face and OpenRouter.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Extraordinary people, breakthrough innovation, global impact” – the company highlights collaborative, low‑overhead teams with little bureaucracy.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office with locations in Sunnyvale, San Diego, Toronto, and Bangalore. Inclusive and flexible policy.
- **Perks**: Premium medical/dental/vision, life insurance, generous vacation, 401(k) and Group RRSP retirement plans, daily catered meals, healthy snacks, family‑friendly events (including CEO’s famous BBQ).
- **Engineering focus**: Tackling fundamental challenges in chip design, system software, compiler technology, and ML workflows. Positions range from hardware (Design Verification, Manufacturing) to software (SRE, Compiler, Cloud).
- **Philanthrophy**: Supports local communities and hosts students from around the world for Q&A.

## Sources
1. [cerebras.ai/company](https://www.cerebras.ai/company)
2. [cerebras.ai](https://www.cerebras.ai/)
3. [cerebras.ai/join-us](https://www.cerebras.ai/join-us)
4. [linkedin.com/company/cerebras-systems](https://www.linkedin.com/company/cerebras-systems)

## Other roles at Cerebras Systems

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