Engineering Manager, Cloud Platform

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 $300M Series E https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-baseten-s-300m-series-e/, backed by investors including BOND, IVP, Spark Capital, Greylock, and Conviction. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE As the Engineering Manager for Baseten's Cloud Platform team, you will directly manage a team of cloud platform engineers responsible for building the systems and processes that keep our infrastructure scalable, reliable, and efficient — from automated deployments and monitoring to performance optimization and incident response. You are a people-first leader with a strong cloud infrastructure background. You set a high bar for reliability and operational excellence, engage credibly in technical discussions and code reviews, and know how to build a culture of ownership and accountability. You'll spend most of your time close to the work: unblocking your team, shaping technical direction on day-to-day decisions, and developing your engineers. At Baseten, we work closely with our users to understand their struggles operationalizing ML — you'll keep your team connected to that mission and translate user learnings into better infrastructure. RESPONSIBILITIES - Recruit, hire, and grow a high-performing team of cloud platform engineers; provide ongoing coaching, feedback, and career development through regular 1:1s. - Set clear performance expectations, hold a high bar, and create an environment where engineers do their best work. - Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement. - Drive day-to-day technical decisions through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions; translate the infrastructure roadmap into clear team priorities and milestones, and hold execution against them. - Establish standards and best practices for reliability, performance, and operational excellence; ensure the team owns projects end-to-end, from specification through production. - Exercise and encourage good judgment on tooling and architectural tradeoffs, with a bias against unnecessary complexity. - Partner with product and engineering teams to align infrastructure work with business priorities; represent your team's progress, capacity, and technical tradeoffs clearly to leadership. - Serve as the escalation point for major incidents; drive resolution with urgency, ensure the team learns systematically, and stay connected to users so those learnings feed back into infrastructure improvements. REQUIREMENTS - Proven experience directly managing engineers in a cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or SRE context (not managing managers). - Extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes, with the ability to engage credibly in architectural discussions and code reviews. - Strong background building and maintaining scalable, production infrastructure. - Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) and CI/CD tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Jenkins). - Demonstrated ability to drive projects end-to-end — from specification to execution — and coach your team to do the same. - Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to influence across teams without direct authority. - Track record of recruiting and growing engineering talent. - Openness to learning about ML infrastructure; prior machine learning experience is not required. NICE TO HAVE - Experience with OSS observability tooling (Prometheus, ELK stack, Grafana, OpenTelemetry). - Background in multi-cloud environments or GPU infrastructure. - Experience buildi