Engineering Manager Runtime - Storage
San Francisco · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Oct 15, 2026
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- San Francisco
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 https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-our-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 the role
- As Engineering Manager for Storage Products on the Runtime Fabric team, you will lead the engineers who build and run the storage products behind the Baseten stack.
- You will own reliability for the area as a measured outcome, report to the head of Runtime Fabric, and stay close to the code through design and code review.
Responsibilities
- Hire and grow a team of 5 to 10 systems engineers with storage, caching, and Linux expertise.
- Run the team’s planning and delivery: scope work against the Runtime Fabric roadmap, set priorities, and ship on a predictable cadence.
- Provide regular coaching, feedback, and career development support to your direct reports.
- Own on-call health for the team’s services, including escalation paths and follow-through on incidents.
- Guide the architecture and evolution of the Baseten Delivery Network: the tiered caching and weight delivery product that makes cold starts 2-3x faster and eliminates thundering herd failures during burst scaling events.
- Shape storage products tailored to Baseten’s workloads: extend BDN from model weights to container images, training checkpoints, and deployment artifacts, and define the interfaces that model deployment, training, and customers use to reach them.
- Oversee the on-host side of delivery: lazy-loading snapshotters, EROFS and overlayfs layouts, and block-level delivery (FUSE, ublk) for multi-gigabyte files.
- Own reliability of the delivery path as a measured outcome: end-to-end instrumentation from snapshotter initialization to first inference request, targets for cold start and cache behavior, tolerance for failing upstream registries and object stores, and safe rollout of changes to a path every customer depends on.
- Make the delivery path work across heterogeneous clusters and cloud providers, each with its own object store and network.
- Review designs and code across the area, and take on hands-on work where it unblocks the team.
Requirements
- Experience managing a team of engineers in a systems, infrastructure, or storage context, including hiring and performance management
- Hands-on background in distributed storage systems, content-addressable storage, or large-scale caching infrastructure
- Strong systems programming background in Go, Rust, and/or C/C++, with the ability to engage credibly in code reviews and architectural discussions
- Working knowledge of the Linux storage stack: filesystems, the page cache, block devices, and mounts
- 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
Preferred qualifications
- Contributions to containerd/containerd, snapshotter projects (stargz, soci, nydus, overlaybd), distribution/distribution, or closely related open-source projects
- Familiarity with lazy-loading snapshotters or peer-to-peer image distribution
- Experience with EROFS, FUSE, ublk, or io_uring
- Experience building or operating CDN, object storage, or large-scale caching infrastructure
- Experience running storage services on Kubernetes
Benefits
- Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
- 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents (U.S. only)
- Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break
- Paid parental leave
- Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
- Company-facilitated 401(k) (U.S. only)
- Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities
Skills
- Go
- Rust
- C
- C++
- Linux
- EROFS
- FUSE
- Ublk
- Io_uring
- Kubernetes
- Containerd
