Cluster Engineer

Position Summary
We are seeking a highly experienced AI Infrastructure Engineer to architect, deploy, optimize, and operate large-scale GPU clusters supporting state-of-the-art AI training and inference workloads. This is a deeply technical role focused on maximizing cluster efficiency, scalability, and performance across the entire AI stack—from GPU hardware and high-speed networking to distributed training frameworks and inference optimization.
The ideal candidate has built GPU clusters from the ground up, tuned distributed training environments, optimized large-scale inference deployments, and understands how every layer of the infrastructure contributes to application performance.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and optimize multi-node GPU clusters for AI training and inference workloads.

• Tune distributed training environments to maximize GPU utilization, throughput, and scaling efficiency.

• Optimize inference clusters for maximum token generation throughput, low latency, and high GPU utilization.

• Build and support production AI infrastructure running hundreds to thousands of GPUs.

• Analyze and eliminate performance bottlenecks across compute, networking, storage, and software layers.

• Perform NCCL benchmarking, analysis, and tuning to achieve optimal collective communication performance.

• Design and optimize GPU networking using InfiniBand or RoCE v2, including RDMA, congestion management, topology awareness, and QoS.

• Configure and tune distributed AI software stacks including:

  • PyTorch

  • NCCL

  • CUDA

  • UCX

  • MPI

  • Slurm

  • Pyxis/Enroot

• Optimize GPU scheduling and resource allocation for both training and inference environments.

• Develop repeatable benchmarking and validation processes for new hardware, firmware, drivers, and software releases.

• Identify performance regressions and troubleshoot distributed training issues at scale.

• Optimize storage architectures for AI workloads, including checkpointing, dataset streaming, and high-performance parallel I/O.

• Work closely with ML engineers to improve training scalability and inference efficiency.

• Create automation to deploy, validate, benchmark, and monitor GPU clusters.

• Evaluate emerging AI infrastructure technologies and recommend improvements to platform architecture.

  
  
  Required Qualifications

• 7+ years designing or operating large-scale Linux infrastructure.

• 5+ years supporting production GPU clusters for AI or HPC workloads.

• Demonstrated experience building multi-node GPU training environments from the ground up.

• Deep expertise with distributed PyTorch training.

• Extensive experience troubleshooting and optimizing NCCL communications.

• Strong understanding of distributed AI communication patterns, including:

  • AllReduce

  • ReduceScatter

  • AllGather

  • Broadcast

  • Point-to-point communications

• Experience benchmarking distributed training using tools such as:

  • nccl-tests

  • NVIDIA DCGM

  • Nsight Systems

  • MLPerf (preferred)

• Strong understanding of GPU memory management, including:

  • KV Cache

  • Activation checkpointing

  • Tensor Parallelism

  • Pipeline Parallelism

  • Data Parallelism

• Experience optimizing LLM inference throughput, including:

  • Tokens/sec optimization

  • Batch sizing

  • Continuous batching

  • KV cache tuning

  • Memory bandwidth optimization

• Experience tuning CUDA, NCCL, UCX, and MPI for maximum distributed performance.

• Expert-level Linux systems administration skills.

• Experience with Slurm workload manager.

• Experience using Pyxis and Enroot for containerized GPU workloads.

• Strong scripting skills using Python and Bash.

Technical Expertise
AI Frameworks

• PyTorch

• CUDA

• NCCL

• Triton (preferred)

• TensorRT-LLM (preferred)

Cluster Scheduling

• Slurm

• Pyxis

• Enroot

GPU Networking
Strong understanding of:

• InfiniBand

• RoCE v2

• RDMA

• GPUDirect RDMA

• GPUDirect Storage

• UCX

• MPI

• Network topology optimization

• Congestion control

• QoS

• ECN/PFC

• High-speed Ethernet (200/400/800 GbE)

Storage
Experience designing or tuning storage for AI workloads, including:

• Parallel file systems

• Distributed storage

• Object storage

• NVMe

• Checkpoint optimization

• Dataset staging

• GPUDirect Storage

• Storage bandwidth optimization

• Metadata performance

Performance Engineering
Experience with:

• NCCL benchmarking

• Multi-node scaling analysis

• GPU utilization optimization

• Communication/computation overlap

• NUMA optimization

• CPU affinity

• PCIe topology

• GPU topology (NVLink/NVSwitch)

• Memory bandwidth analysis

• End-to-end performance profiling

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience deploying AI workloads on Kubernetes.

• Experience with NVIDIA GPU Operator.

• Experience with Kubernetes batch scheduling (Volcano, Kueue, Run:ai, etc.).

• Experience with distributed inference platforms such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or SGLang.

• Experience with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD or similar large-scale GPU deployments.

• Familiarity with MLPerf benchmarking.

• Experience deploying monitoring solutions such as Prometheus, Grafana, and DCGM Exporter.

• Experience automating infrastructure using Ansible, Terraform, or similar tools.

• Experience working in cloud GPU environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) in addition to bare metal.