ML Systems Engineer, Infrastructure & Cloud

Job Overview

ML Systems Engineers at Basis ensure training and evaluation infrastructure is fast, reliable, and scalable. You will own the full stack from distributed training frameworks through cloud administration, making it possible for researchers to iterate quickly on complex models while managing computational resources efficiently. We are looking for engineers who combine deep understanding of ML systems with operational excellence.

Key Responsibilities

• Own distributed training infrastructure including job launchers, checkpointing systems, recovery mechanisms, and monitoring that ensures experiments run reliably at scale.


• Debug and resolve training failures by diagnosing issues across GPUs, networking, numerics, and data pipelines, maintaining detailed logs of problems and solutions.


• Profile and optimize training performance by identifying bottlenecks in data loading, gradient computation, communication overhead, and implementing solutions that improve step time.


• Manage cloud infrastructure and costs including capacity planning, spot instance strategies, storage optimization, and building tools that give researchers visibility into resource usage.


• Implement security and compliance measures including access controls, data encryption, audit logging, and ensuring infrastructure meets requirements for handling sensitive data.


• Build evaluation and benchmarking infrastructure that enables consistent, reproducible measurement of model performance across different conditions and datasets.


• Develop monitoring and alerting systems that detect anomalies in training metrics, resource utilization, or system health, enabling rapid response to issues.


• Maintain development environments including containerization, dependency management, and tools that ensure researchers can reproduce results across different systems.


• Document and share knowledge through runbooks, post-mortems, and training materials that help the team understand and operate ML infrastructure effectively.


• Collaborate with researchers to understand requirements, suggest infrastructure solutions, and ensure systems support rather than constrain research goals.

About Basis

Basis is a nonprofit applied AI research organization with two mutually reinforcing goals. The first is to understand and build intelligence. This means to establish the mathematical principles of what it means to reason, to learn, to make decisions, to understand, and to explain; and to construct software that implements these principles. The second is to advance society’s ability to solve intractable problems.

Required Qualifications

• Have demonstrated expertise in ML systems engineering.


• Possess deep knowledge of distributed training frameworks including PyTorch/JAX distributed strategies (DDP, FSDP, ZeRO), gradient accumulation, mixed precision training, and checkpoint/recovery systems.


• Have strong cloud administration skills including AWS/GCP/Azure services, infrastructure as code (Terraform), Kubernetes orchestration, cost optimization, security best practices, and compliance requirements.


• Understand the full ML stack from hardware (GPUs, interconnects, storage) through frameworks (PyTorch, JAX) to high-level training loops and evaluation pipelines.


• Be skilled at debugging complex failures across the stack—GPU/NCCL issues, data loading bottlenecks, memory leaks, gradient explosions, and convergence problems.


• Value documentation and knowledge sharing.


• Progress with autonomy while coordinating closely with researchers.