Startups · AI

Member of Technical Staff, Systems Infrastructure (2026 PhD New Grad)

Fireworks · San Mateo · Remote

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About Fireworks

Fireworks’ state of the art training and inference platform take you beyond the frontier, transforming open models into your specialized intelligence. Backed by Bessemer, Index and Lightspeed.

About the role

This role is designed for systems researchers finishing their PhD who want to see their ideas run on real fleets at real scale. As a Member of Technical Staff on the Systems Infrastructure team, you'll design and build the substrate underneath Fireworks — the schedulers, storage systems, and networks that keep tens of thousands of accelerators busy and inference latency low.

What they're looking for

  • PhD completed within the last 6 months, or expected completion by December 2026, in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a similar field
  • Research background in one or more of: distributed systems, operating systems, scheduling and resource management, storage systems, computer networks, computer architecture, or high-performance computing
  • Depth in at least one of the three focus areas above, demonstrated through your dissertation, publications, or systems you've built
  • Strong systems programming skills in C/C++, Rust, Go, or a similar language, plus working proficiency in Python
  • Experience building and evaluating real systems — not only simulation — and reasoning rigorously about performance with measurements
  • Ability to communicate systems design and results clearly to audiences with different backgrounds
More about this role

Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI.

This role is designed for systems researchers finishing their PhD who want to see their ideas run on real fleets at real scale. As a Member of Technical Staff on the Systems Infrastructure team, you'll design and build the substrate underneath Fireworks — the schedulers, storage systems, and networks that keep tens of thousands of accelerators busy and inference latency low.

The problems here are the ones your dissertation probably touched: how to place compute-intensive jobs across heterogeneous hardware without stranding capacity, how to move model weights and KV cache fast...

Read the full posting on Fireworks's site ↗

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