Baseten

Site Reliability Engineer at Baseten (San Francisco, CA)

Baseten· San Francisco, CA· $165k–$330k·

Role details

Salary
$165k–$330k
Work type
Hybrid
Employment
Full-Time
Equity
Yes
Skills
KubernetesObservability toolingMetricsLoggingDashboardsAlerting pipelinesInfrastructure-as-codeTerraformHelmGitOpsFlux CDArgoCD
Benefits

Competitive Compensation · Equity · 100% Coverage Of Medical, Dental, And Vision Insurance · Flexible PTO Policy · Company Wide Winter Break · Paid Parental Leave · Fertility And Family-Building Stipend · Company-Facilitated 401(K)

Baseten at a glance

AI inference platform for deploying, optimizing, and running machine learning models in production at scale.

Baseten runs trained AI models in production for other companies, handling the GPUs, autoscaling, runtime, and performance tuning so engineering teams get a fast, reliable API without operating the infrastructure themselves. It supports open source, custom, and fine tuned models across managed cloud, hybrid, and self hosted deployments.

$2B+ raised · latest: Series F · $1.5B · June 2026 (valuations of $13B and $11B across two tranches) · backed by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, Spark Capital, Sands Capital

Summary

Define and codify day-2 operations for the ML infrastructure platform, building robust systems, processes, and observability tooling. The role involves owning multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure reliability, improving alerting, and creating AI-assisted incident response tooling to ensure platform reliability at sc...

Job description

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 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
  • (U.S. only) 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
  • (U.S. only) 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).

Why work at Baseten

  • Hard Technical Problems: Engineers work on the most challenging problems in modern infrastructure—model serving, low-level GPU optimization, networking, distributed systems, and observability. This is a high-agency, high-impact engineering environment.
  • High Growth Trajectory: The company is experiencing explosive growth (224% headcount increase, active hiring). This offers significant career acceleration and ownership opportunities.
  • Strong Engineering Culture: Founded by engineers, for engineers. The culture emphasizes "first-principles thinking across the entire stack" and a "customer-obsessed" mindset. The employer rating on compensation, culture, and work-life balance is rated highly (5.0).
  • Top-Tier Team & Investors: The team has strong talent density with hires from Meta, Stripe, Google, NVIDIA, and Databricks. Being backed by top-tier VCs provides stability and a clear long-term vision.
  • Hybrid/In-Office: Based in San Francisco with a strong in-person or hybrid culture common for fast-moving infrastructure startups.

Application questions