Demo

Lead Infrastructure and Reliability Engineer (Systems & Scale)

Luma
Palo Alto, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 5/3/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 6/26/2026
About Luma AI

A new class of intelligence is emerging, systems that understand and generate the world across video, images, audio, and language.

Building multimodal AGI is not just a modeling challenge. It is an infrastructure challenge at the edge of what hardware, software, and organizations can support.

At Luma, we operate rapidly scaling 10k GPU fleets, pushing utilization, throughput, and reliability hard enough that yesterday’s solutions break regularly. Researchers depend on this infrastructure to move the frontier forward. Customers depend on it to power real creative work.

Many companies run accelerators.

Very few sit directly next to the teams inventing the models that redefine what those accelerators must do.

At Luma, improvements to scheduling, efficiency, and reliability immediately translate into faster research iteration and entirely new product capabilities.

We are still early. The playbook is still being written. A single exceptional engineer can reshape how the company operates.

Where You Come In

Our Infrastructure Engineering team is a systems engineering group with company-level responsibility.

At Luma, reliability engineers work directly with the researchers and products pushing the limits of multimodal intelligence.

We Operate Close To The Metal

  • Kernels
  • Containers
  • Schedulers
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • GPU behavior

But We Are Also Responsible For Something Bigger

Turning deep systems knowledge into repeatable, scalable reliability for the entire company.

We are hiring a leader who will define that direction.

You will be a technical authority, an organizational force multiplier, and a magnet for other great engineers.

What You’ll Own

Reliability of the Frontier

  • Architect and operate large, heterogeneous GPU environments under extreme demand
  • Improve utilization and performance where small gains materially change company outcomes
  • Resolve failures that span hardware, OS, runtimes, and orchestration
  • Eliminate entire classes of instability
  • Build mechanisms that make heroics unnecessary

Scaling Training & Inference

  • Define how infrastructure and workloads evolve as cluster size and concurrency grow
  • Design scheduling, placement, and resource management approaches for increasingly complex jobs
  • Work directly with research to build the systems required for new model capabilities
  • Ensure inference platforms scale rapidly without sacrificing reliability or latency
  • Anticipate where today’s abstractions will fail and redesign ahead of them

Building the Organization

  • Hire and develop exceptional systems and reliability engineers
  • Set the bar for technical depth, judgment, and production ownership
  • Shape architecture early through strong partnerships with research and product
  • Translate reliability constraints into long-term platform strategy

Required

Who You Are

  • Deep expertise in Linux and distributed systems
  • Experience operating GPU / accelerator clusters in real production environments
  • Strong fluency in Kubernetes and modern open-source infrastructure
  • Comfortable debugging across hardware → kernel → runtime → orchestration
  • You understand how systems behave under contention and at scale
  • You write code and build automation
  • You think in bottlenecks, failure modes, and tradeoffs
  • Engineers trust your judgment, especially when things break

Important: This role requires comfort operating close to upstream and close to the metal. If most of your experience has been inside highly abstracted internal platforms where others owned the underlying machinery, this is unlikely to be a match.

Leadership Expectations

  • You raise reliability standards across the company
  • You influence product and research architecture early
  • You build strong partnerships, not ticket queues
  • You attract and level up exceptional engineers
  • You are curious how models use infrastructure, because improving systems expands what becomes possible

Why This Role Is Special

Most infrastructure roles optimize mature systems.

This one helps define how reliability works for a new generation of AI infrastructure.

The Decisions You Make Here Will Influence

  • How research progresses
  • How products scale
  • How customers trust us
  • And how the engineering organization grows

If you want to build the reliability foundations of a company operating at the technological frontier, we should talk.

Salary.com Estimation for Lead Infrastructure and Reliability Engineer (Systems & Scale) in Palo Alto, CA
$110,631 to $130,429
If your compensation planning software is too rigid to deploy winning incentive strategies, it’s time to find an adaptable solution. Compensation Planning
Enhance your organization's compensation strategy with salary data sets that HR and team managers can use to pay your staff right. Surveys & Data Sets

What is the career path for a Lead Infrastructure and Reliability Engineer (Systems & Scale)?

Sign up to receive alerts about other jobs on the Lead Infrastructure and Reliability Engineer (Systems & Scale) career path by checking the boxes next to the positions that interest you.
Income Estimation: 
$103,114 - $138,258
Income Estimation: 
$118,163 - $145,996
Income Estimation: 
$120,777 - $151,022
Income Estimation: 
$129,363 - $167,316
Income Estimation: 
$86,891 - $130,303
Income Estimation: 
$92,877 - $110,401
Income Estimation: 
$120,933 - $155,034
Income Estimation: 
$114,618 - $136,401
Employees: Get a Salary Increase
View Core, Job Family, and Industry Job Skills and Competency Data for more than 15,000 Job Titles Skills Library

Job openings at Luma

  • Luma Palo Alto, CA
  • Our mission is to build multimodal AI to expand human imagination and capabilities. We believe that multimodality is critical for intelligence. To go beyon... more
  • 12 Days Ago

  • Luma Palo Alto, CA
  • About Luma AI Luma's mission is to build multimodal AI to expand human imagination and capabilities. We believe multimodality is critical for intelligence.... more
  • 15 Days Ago

  • Luma Palo Alto, CA
  • About Luma AI Luma's mission is to build multimodal AI to expand human imagination and capabilities. We believe that multimodality is critical for intellig... more
  • 1 Day Ago

  • Luma Palo Alto, CA
  • About The Role This is a foundational opportunity to refine, personalize, and build the final capabilities and control interface of Luma’s foundation model... more
  • 1 Day Ago


Not the job you're looking for? Here are some other Lead Infrastructure and Reliability Engineer (Systems & Scale) jobs in the Palo Alto, CA area that may be a better fit.

  • TikTok San Jose, CA
  • Responsibilities The Data Infrastructure SRE team is responsible for the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of the core data services that power our ... more
  • 14 Days Ago

  • Tesla Motors, Inc. Palo Alto, CA
  • What to Expect Tesla's Supercomputing/AI infrastructure team works directly with the high-performance computing and machine learning infrastructure on whic... more
  • 15 Days Ago

AI Assistant is available now!

Feel free to start your new journey!