Backend/Distributed Systems Engineer (AI)

Location: Hybrid in San Francisco, New York, or Seattle, United States.

Salary: $165K–$330K annually, plus equity.

Company

Baseten provides an AI inference platform, infrastructure, and developer tooling that help AI companies bring machine-learning models into production.

What you will do

• Design and build scalable telemetry ingestion and storage pipelines for metrics, logs, and traces across multi-cloud infrastructure.
• Own observability platforms, commercialization and billing systems, partnership integrations, and internal AI agent infrastructure.
• Develop internal tooling that improves developer velocity, CI/CD, deployment safety, testing, alerting, incident response, and production debugging.
• Drive platform adoption through self-service developer experience, good defaults, clear documentation, and low-friction workflows.
• Lead technical design for cross-team projects and make trade-offs between delivery speed, quality, reliability, cost, and maintainability.
• Partner with infrastructure, model performance, and product teams while contributing through code review, mentorship, and technical writing.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of relevant industry experience focused on scalable backend systems and platforms.
• Experience building or operating observability systems covering logging, metrics, and tracing, or operating internal infrastructure at scale.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, or a similar backend language.
• Strong understanding of quality and engineering principles, including both the purpose and implementation of engineering decisions.
• Strong systems-level thinking and understanding of interactions between distributed-system components and data flows.
• Platform mindset focused on adoption, self-service, internal engineers as customers, and effective defaults.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Culture & Benefits

• Meaningful equity and competitive compensation.
• For U.S. employees, 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents.
• Flexible PTO and a company-wide Winter Break from Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day.
• Paid parental leave and a fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot.
• For U.S. employees, a company-facilitated 401(k).
• Exposure to ML startups and opportunities for learning and networking.