Hybrid Forward Deployed SRE

at Baseten

• Job title: Forward Deployed SRE
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: $135,000 - $285,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Grafana, Kubernetes, Prometheus
• Location requirements: Hybrid, San Francisco, United States

About the role

• Primary post-sales technical owner ensuring reliability of ML workloads for strategic customers at AI company. Collaborating with teams to drive technical success and product improvements.

Responsibilities

• Diagnose and resolve runtime issues related to latency, memory behavior, GPU utilization, concurrency, and model lifecycle management.
• Debug infrastructure issues across Kubernetes (pods, controllers), networking, observability, and alerting systems.
• Lead incident response during outages or escalations, managing coordination between Product, FDE, Sales, and Engineering.
• Serve as the technical owner for top enterprise accounts with strict SLAs and high responsiveness expectations.
• Identify common failure modes and translate user feedback into roadmap signals, product improvements, our internal runbooks, knowledge bases, and diagnostic best practices.
• Own project coordination end-to-end: scoping, execution, communication, and stakeholder alignment across technical and non-technical teams ranging from feature requests, new deployments, and operational debugging issues.

Requirements

• Deep Kubernetes troubleshooting expertise, including advanced resource debugging, pod/runtime analysis, and log-based diagnostics using observability tooling such as Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus.
• Strong infrastructure debugging ability across container orchestration, networking, and service dependencies, with hands-on experience supporting production-grade clusters.
• Experience managing high-severity incidents with major customers, including SLAs, post-incident reviews, and clear communication throughout escalations.
• Proven project management and organizational skills with an ownership mindset, able to manage multiple complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives in parallel — including issue resolution, root-cause analysis, and feature delivery.
• Ability to translate recurring technical pain points into roadmap-level insights, documentation improvements, or product enhancements.
• Strong communication skills and executive presence during high-visibility situations, ensuring technical clarity and customer confidence.
• 3+ years of experience in a fast-paced, high-growth, or customer-facing engineering environment.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Generous PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
• Paid parental leave
• Company-facilitated 401(k)
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.