Engineering Manager, Site Reliability Engineering

📋 Job Overview

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

🏢 About Baseten

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital.

🎯 The Role

You will be responsible for recruiting, hiring, and growing Baseten’s first SRE team in London, setting clear performance expectations, and fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement. You will own the reliability of Baseten’s multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure during your team’s hours, including incident response, post-mortems, and remediation tracking.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Recruit, hire, and grow Baseten’s first SRE team in London, with ongoing coaching, feedback, and career development through regular 1:1s.
• Set clear performance expectations, hold a high bar, and foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Own the reliability of Baseten’s multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure during your team’s hours, including incident response, post-mortems, and remediation tracking.
• Partner with SRE leadership in the US to design follow-the-sun on-call rotations, escalation paths, and handoff processes.
• Serve as the escalation point for major incidents, drive resolution with urgency, and make sure the team learns from every incident.
• Drive technical decisions through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions. Turn the reliability roadmap into clear team priorities and milestones, and hold the team accountable for delivering them.
• Lead the team in defining and instrumenting SLOs and SLIs, and in building observability infrastructure (metrics, logging, dashboards, and alerting) as code.
• Turn recurring failure patterns and tribal knowledge into runbooks, automated mitigations, and self-healing systems.
• Partner with engineering, forward deployed, capacity, and product teams to raise the operational floor across the company, and represent your team’s progress, capacity, and tradeoffs clearly to leadership.
• Ensure the fleet is healthy and operational across all clusters. Interact with vendors and internal teams to remediate node failures and reliability concerns.
• Exercise and encourage good judgment on tooling and architectural tradeoffs, with a bias against unnecessary complexity.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience directly managing engineers in an SRE, cloud infrastructure, or platform engineering context.
• Extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes, with the ability to engage credibly in architectural discussions and code reviews (multi-cloud experience across EKS, GKE, or similar is a strong plus).
• Strong background building and maintaining scalable production infrastructure.
• Strong foundation in observability tooling: metrics (VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus), logging (Loki, ELK), dashboards (Grafana), and alerting pipelines.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm) and GitOps workflows (Flux CD, ArgoCD).
• Experience leading incident response, running post-mortems, and building on-call rotations and runbooks.
• Track record of recruiting and growing engineering talent.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across time zones and influence without direct authority.
• Openness to learning about ML infrastructure. Prior machine learning experience is not required.
• Ability to work onsite in our London office 3 days a week.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience building a new team or establishing an engineering presence in a new region.
• Observability-as-code experience.
• Background in multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
• Familiarity with incident management platforms (incident.io or similar).
• Background in GPU infrastructure, or in diagnosing runtime issues around latency, memory behaviour, GPU utilisation, and concurrency.

🎁 Benefits

Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity. Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!). Paid parental leave. Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot. Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Ability to work onsite in our London office 3 days a week.