Engineering Manager Runtime - Storage

Baseten • San Francisco, CA

8d • $165,000 - $330,000

About The Position

As Engineering Manager for Storage Products on Baseten’s Runtime Fabric team, you will lead the engineers who build and operate storage products behind the platform’s container runtime and storage layers for AI inference workloads. These products include the Baseten Delivery Network (BDN), snapshotters, and filesystems that expose model weights and container images to running containers, as well as storage needed for model deployment and training. The team is advancing caching for inference workloads from the origin tier to the GPU host.

You will own reliability for the area as a measured outcome, report to the head of Runtime Fabric, and remain close to the code through design and code review. The role combines team leadership, technical direction, reliability ownership, and cross-functional coordination across deployment, training, infrastructure, product, and upstream open-source projects.

Requirements

• Experience managing engineers in a systems, infrastructure, or storage context, including hiring and performance management.
• Hands-on background in distributed storage systems, content-addressable storage, or large-scale caching infrastructure.
• Strong systems programming background in Go, Rust, and/or C/C++, with the ability to engage in code reviews and architectural discussions.
• Working knowledge of the Linux storage stack, including filesystems, the page cache, block devices, and mounts.
• Understanding of how container images are structured, stored, and delivered at scale.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to influence without authority across teams.

Nice To Haves

• Contributions to containerd/containerd, snapshotter projects such as stargz, soci, nydus, or overlaybd, distribution/distribution, or closely related open-source projects.
• Familiarity with lazy-loading snapshotters or peer-to-peer image distribution.
• Experience with EROFS, FUSE, ublk, or io_uring.
• Experience building or operating CDN, object storage, or large-scale caching infrastructure.
• Experience running storage services on Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Hire and grow a team of 5 to 10 systems engineers with storage, caching, and Linux expertise.
• Run team planning and delivery by scoping work against the Runtime Fabric roadmap, setting priorities, and shipping on a predictable cadence.
• Provide regular coaching, feedback, and career development support to direct reports.
• Own on-call health for the team’s services, including escalation paths and incident follow-through.
• Guide the architecture and evolution of the Baseten Delivery Network, a tiered caching and weight delivery product intended to accelerate cold starts and prevent thundering herd failures during burst scaling.
• Shape storage products for Baseten’s workloads, extend BDN to container images, training checkpoints, and deployment artifacts, and define interfaces for model deployment, training, and customers.
• Oversee on-host delivery, including lazy-loading snapshotters, EROFS and overlayfs layouts, and block-level delivery using FUSE and ublk.
• Own delivery-path reliability through end-to-end instrumentation, cold-start and cache-behavior targets, resilience to failing upstream registries and object stores, and safe rollouts.
• Ensure the delivery path works across heterogeneous clusters and cloud providers with differing object stores and networks.
• Review designs and code across the area and take on hands-on work where it unblocks the team.
• Champion contributions to containerd and the snapshotter ecosystem alongside Runtime Fabric maintainers.
• Act as the point of contact for storage across Baseten and provide integration support to model deployment, training, and platform teams.
• Optimize requirements for underlying storage platforms with the infrastructure team, including object storage, local NVMe and block storage, and cluster network bandwidth.
• Manage dependencies in both directions by sequencing work, negotiating interfaces and timelines with internal teams, and coordinating with upstream projects.
• Work with the head of Runtime Fabric and product stakeholders to prioritize storage investments based on customer impact and infrastructure reliability.
• Communicate team progress, technical trade-offs, and incidents clearly to the team and leadership.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• For U.S. employees: 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents.
• Flexible PTO policy, including a company-wide Winter Break when offices are closed from Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day.
• Paid parental leave.
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot.
• For U.S. employees: company-facilitated 401(k).
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering learning and networking opportunities.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed