Director of AI Infrastructure

About the role

The Director of AI Infrastructure oversees the systems that power Ai2's research. This leader is responsible for the full lifecycle of Ai2's high-performance computing (HPC) environment, which includes on-prem GPU clusters and the software orchestration layer that schedules workloads across a hybrid cloud environment.

Responsibilities

• Cluster Management: Oversee the availability and performance of dense on-prem GPU clusters. Partner with hardware vendors and internal teams to ensure physical infrastructure meets the demands of frontier model training.
• Orchestration & Scheduling: Direct the strategy for Beaker, our internal orchestration platform. Optimize job scheduling to ensure high utilization of both on-prem assets and elastic cloud resources (AWS/GCP).
• Storage Architecture: Develop and execute a long-term roadmap for storage that balances high-throughput performance for active training with cost-effective durability for petascale research data.
• Resource Economics: Act as the primary steward of our GPU compute budget. Make data-driven decisions on when to burst to the cloud versus when to invest in on-prem capacity.
• User Support & Velocity: Serve as the technical bridge to our research teams. Ensure infrastructure accelerates, rather than hinders, a diverse set of research objectives.

Requirements

• Experience: 12+ years in infrastructure, systems engineering, or HPC, with at least 5 years in a leadership role managing multi-disciplinary engineering teams.
• Bachelor’s degree in related field; relevant advanced degree may substitute for equivalent years of technical work experience.
• GPU/HPC Stack: Direct experience managing large-scale NVIDIA GPU clusters and high-performance networking (InfiniBand/RoCE).
• Cloud Native: Strong background in Kubernetes, Slurm, or similar orchestration frameworks, particularly in hybrid-cloud configurations.
• Storage Mastery: Experience with distributed filesystems (e.g., WEKA, Ceph, Lustre) and cloud storage integration at scale.
• Software Development: Proficient in Go or Python, with the ability to review architecture and code for our internal tooling.

Qualifications

• Systems Expert: Deep understanding of the Linux kernel, container runtimes, and distributed systems. Knowledge of InfiniBand topologies and NCCL optimizations.
• Strategic Thinker: Ability to design systems that scale for the next 3–5 years of AI research.
• Pragmatic Leader: Comfortable making trade-offs between technical elegance and operational necessity. Prioritizes reliability and researcher velocity.

Skills

• Linux Kernel
• Container Runtimes
• Distributed Systems
• InfiniBand Topologies
• NCCL Optimizations
• Kubernetes
• Slurm
• WEKA
• Ceph
• Lustre
• Go
• Python

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, Vision Insurance
• Health Savings Account Plan
• Healthcare Reimbursement Arrangement Plan
• Flexible Spending Account Plans
• 401(k) Plan
• Commuting Assistance Program
• Wellness Assistance Program
• Annual Bonuses
• Long-Term Incentive Plan

Pay

Base salary range: $176,400 - $264,600. Bonus plans provided to offer a competitive compensation package.

Schedule

On-site requirements vary based on position and team. For questions about on-site work arrangements, please ask your recruiter.