Senior Systems Engineer - AI Infrastructure

Clockwork.io•Palo Alto, CA

4h•$150,000 - $210,000

About The Position

Clockwork Systems is building infrastructure for fault-tolerant, high-performance distributed GPU training. The Senior Systems Engineer will work at the intersection of GPU systems, high-speed networking, and distributed coordination—designing and implementing systems that run at scale. This is a systems building role where the engineer will dig into internals, understand why things break under pressure, and design solutions that handle the messy reality of distributed systems.

Requirements

Systems building experience: designed and built complex systems—not just deployed or operated them (e.g., Kernel subsystems, device drivers, or OS-level components; Distributed storage, databases, or coordination systems; Runtimes, profilers, or performance tooling; Network stacks, protocols, or high-performance I/O systems; Large-scale infrastructure at the systems layer)
Strong C/C++ in systems contexts
Deep understanding of concurrency, memory models.
Experience reasoning about distributed system behavior: consistency, ordering, partial failures
Comfortable reading and modifying large, unfamiliar codebases

Nice To Haves

GPU programming (CUDA) or GPU systems experience
High-performance networking (RDMA, InfiniBand)
ML framework or runtime internals
Cluster scheduling or orchestration systems

Responsibilities

Design and implement low-level systems software for GPU clusters
Work with internals of frameworks like PyTorch, NCCL, CUDA runtime—not as a user, but modifying and extending them
Build components that make large-scale GPU training more reliable and efficient
Debug complex distributed/concurrent systems where failures are subtle and non-deterministic
Own systems end-to-end: from design through production