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MBZUAI (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence) · 3 hours ago

Foundation Model DevOps Engineer

Sunnyvale, CA

Full-time

Onsite

Mid Level

$150K/yr - $350K/yr

3+ years exp

The Institute of Foundation Models is a dedicated research lab focused on building and understanding foundation models. The Foundation Model DevOps Engineer will ensure operational stability and build the tooling and infrastructure necessary for AI research, facilitating a friction-free environment for model development.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)Higher EducationUniversities

Responsibilities

You own the standard of our public presence. You ensure that every release (weights, code, training logs, data) is reproducible, meticulously documented, and packaged with the polish of a top-tier open-source product

Design and implement pipelines that automate the testing and packaging of complex model releases, moving us away from manual handovers to automated verification

Administer the organization’s GitHub Enterprise account, ensuring branch protection and clean versioning practices are enforced across the lab

Manage the efficiency of our large-scale GPU resources. You track utilization to identify idle nodes, 'zombie jobs,' or inefficient scheduling, ensuring we extract maximum value from our compute clusters

Manage the lifecycle of petabyte-scale datasets and checkpoint storage. You implement intelligent aging policies to solve the 'disk full' bottleneck without risking critical data loss

Proactively manage storage and compute quotas across research teams to prevent resource contention before it blocks a training run

Build and maintain the internal CLI tools and dashboards that allow researchers to launch, track, and organize jobs across thousands of GPUs

Set up real-time monitoring for interconnect throughput, GPU memory, and file system latency to catch performance degradation instantly

Work closely with infrastructure teams to optimize how we run synthetic data pipelines and large-scale evaluations, ensuring our tooling scales with our compute

Build the scripts and tooling that instantly provision compute environments, permissions, and storage namespaces for researchers (automating away the manual work)

Streamline SSH and node access protocols to ensure friction-free entry to our massive-scale compute clusters while maintaining security boundaries

Qualification

DevOpsRelease EngineeringFoundation Model FluencyLinux/Unix FluencyVersion Control AdminScripting & AutomationHPC SchedulersCloud StorageProblem-solving skillsTeam collaboration

Required

A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

3+ years of experience in DevOps, Release Engineering, or MLE, specifically within AI/ML or HPC environments

You understand the lifecycle of training large models (LLMs or Diffusion). You know what a checkpoint is, you understand the difference between pre-training and inference, and you are familiar with the artifacts required for a model release

You live in the command line. You have deep expertise in bash scripting, file system permissions, and SSH configuration

Expert-level administration of GitHub Enterprise (managing teams, API limits, and repository security)

Proficiency in Python or Bash to automate repetitive administrative tasks