About the role
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 $300M Series E , backed by investors including BOND, IVP, Spark Capital, Greylock, and Conviction. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products.
THE ROLE Container runtimes were designed for general-purpose software workloads. AI inference is not a general-purpose workload. Running large models at production scale exposes cracks in every layer of the container stack: runtimes unaware of GPU memory constraints, images that take minutes to pull when a model needs to scale to thousands of replicas, and isolation mechanisms that weren't designed for the multi-tenant serving environments that production AI requires. The tools the industry has relied on for a decade weren't built for this, and patching around those limitations at higher layers only goes so far. Baseten owns the entire pipeline, from the moment a developer pushes a model to the moment a request gets a response. That vertical ownership means we can fix these problems at the root. The Runtime Fabrics team is doing exactly that: purpose-building the container runtime and storage layers for AI inference workloads, led by some of the world's top containerd maintainers. As Engineering Manager of the Runtime Fabrics team, you will lead this work, setting technical direction, growing a world-class team of systems engineers, and ensuring
the team's output shapes not just Baseten's infrastructure but the open-source container ecosystem at large. If you've contributed to containerd, runc, or related OCI projects and are ready to lead a team solving some of the hardest problems in infrastructure today, we'd love to talk.
RESPONSIBILITIES Team Leadership & Culture Recruit, hire, and develop a high-performing team of systems engineers with deep container and Linux expertise. Foster a culture of technical rigor, open-source contribution, and continuous improvement. Provide regular coaching, feedback, and career development support to your direct reports. Partner with engineering leadership to define the long-term vision and roadmap for container runtime and storage infrastructure. Technical Direction Guide