Engineering Manager, Runtime Fabric

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 direct reports
• Partner with engineering leadership to define the long-term vision and roadmap for container runtime and storage infrastructure

Technical Direction

• Guide the team in extending and hardening containerd, runc, and related OCI ecosystem projects to meet the GPU-specific requirements of production AI inference, including startup performance, GPU device access, and multi-tenant isolation
• Oversee the architecture and evolution of the Baseten Delivery Network: the tiered caching and weight delivery system that makes cold starts 2–3x faster and eliminates thundering herd failures during burst scaling events
• Drive the expansion of BDN's architecture, currently focused on model weights, to container images, training checkpoints, and deployment artifacts
• Provide technical oversight on GPU-aware isolation mechanisms for multi-tenant inference, including secure container runtimes, Linux namespace hardening, and longer-term micro-VM integration
• Ensure the team maintains end-to-end ownership of the container startup performance path, from snapshotter initialization through weight delivery to first inference request
• Champion the team's contributions back to the open-source containerd ecosystem alongside a team of core maintainers

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Act as the primary advocate for Runtime Fabrics across the organization, ensuring upstream and downstream teams have the integration support they need
• Collaborate with product and engineering stakeholders to prioritize investments based on business impact and infrastructure reliability
• Communicate team progress, technical trade-offs, and architectural decisions clearly to leadership

Requirements

• Proven experience managing and growing engineering teams in a systems, infrastructure, or low-level runtime context
• Deep familiarity with the Linux container ecosystem: containerd, runc, OCI Runtime Spec, Linux namespaces, and cgroups, with the ability to engage credibly in code reviews and architectural discussions
• Contributions to containerd/containerd, opencontainers/runc, google/gvisor, kata-containers/kata-containers, or closely related open-source projects
• Strong systems programming background in Go and/or C/C++
• Experience with distributed storage systems, content-addressable storage, or large-scale caching infrastructure
• Understanding of how container images are structured, stored, and delivered at scale
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence without authority across teams

Nice to Have

• Experience with GPU device access in containers: NVIDIA Container Toolkit, CDI (Container Device Interface), or GPU-aware scheduling
• Familiarity with lazy-loading snapshotters (stargz, soci, EROFS/Nydus) or peer-to-peer image distribution
• Experience with secure container runtimes (gVisor, Sysbox) or micro-VM technologies (Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor)
• Understanding of containerd's shim API (v2) and experience building custom shim implementations
• Background in multi-tenant infrastructure or security-sensitive serving environments

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break
• Paid parental leave
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
• Company-facilitated 401(k)