Site Reliability Engineer
Baseten is hiring a Site Reliability Engineer for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $165k-$330k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Baseten.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting lists this role as remote.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Cursor, Clay and Kubernetes.
- Level classifies it as a senior role.
- Level lists 106 other open roles at Baseten.
AI in this role
Site reliability engineer responsible for scaling and maintaining multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure for ML inference.
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).
How we rate this
Site Reliability Engineer at Baseten rates 85 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- Tell me about a project where site reliability was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where observability was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where incident response was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Site Reliability, Observability, Infrastructure, and Incident Response. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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