# Founding Engineer — ML Platforms Engineer at Cumulus Labs

- Company: Cumulus Labs (YC W26)
- What the company does: The Fastest Multimodal Inference OS. Backed by Y Combinator.
- Company website: https://cumuluslabs.io
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $150K to $300K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-07-11
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/cumulus-labs/jobs/xfY8M84-founding-engineer-ml-platforms-engineer
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/cumulus-labs-founding-engineer-ml-platforms-engineer/

## About the role

Cumulus Labs builds the software that turns raw GPU capacity into fast, cheap, production AI. We're looking for an ML Platforms Engineer to help build and run the orchestration layer underneath our inference and agent products, the system that schedules workloads, allocates GPUs, and keeps a heterogeneous, multi-cloud fleet running at high utilization.

## What they're looking for

- Excellent fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, distributed systems concepts, and the judgment to apply the right pattern to the right problem
- Real production experience, ideally with systems that had to stay up and scale under load
- Strong design instincts: you can reason about tradeoffs, not just follow a framework's conventions
- Fast learner who can go deep in unfamiliar territory, specific experience with Go or Kubernetes is a plus, not a requirement
- Comfortable using modern AI coding tools (we use Claude Code heavily) to move fast without losing rigor
- You want to work in person, in a small team, solving problems nobody has solved before

Tags: Engineering