Infrastructure and Build Engineer

Palisade Research

📍 Remote (Global) 🔄 Rolling Applications 🕔 Full Time

As an Infrastructure and Build Engineer at Palisade, you'll work closely with our research and engineering teams to build and maintain robust infrastructure that accelerates our mission. You'll build tools that let our researchers deploy experiments quickly and efficiently.

What You’ll Do

• Design and maintain our Kubernetes (on Talos) infrastructure that powers our research environments and deployment pipelines

• Implement Nix-based reproducible builds and development environments to ensure consistent setups across the team

• Develop and maintain automation tools using Python to streamline our research and deployment workflows

• Build and improve our LLM observability stack using tools like LangFuse and LiteLLM to ensure our experiments are consistently logged

• Collaborate with researchers to optimize infrastructure for large-scale AI model testing and evaluation

Our Collaboration Process

• We post daily statuses for each other to keep in sync regarding our directions. Each project has a daily sync, and there's a weekly lab demo to show off our results.

• We propose new ideas or directions by writing up a doc, sharing it, and getting comments. This enables async communication.

• Our median response time to each other is in hours, not minutes; we work in an independent and self-directed fashion. Your supervisor helps you maintain direction; colleagues help with the implementation; you keep track of your tasks and milestones.

• We offer high intellectual freedom and value curiosity. You are welcome to challenge anything we do.

What You’ll Need

• Experience Level

  • 4+ years of relevant DevOps or infrastructure engineering experience

  • Track record of independently designing and implementing production infrastructure

  • History of improving deployment workflows and operational efficiency

• Core Skills

  • Kubernetes expertise: cluster management, deployment strategies, and security best practices

  • Reproducible build engineering: use Nix/uv/Docker to ship packages and developer environments

  • Python programming: writing robust automation scripts and infrastructure tooling

  • CI/CD pipeline design and implementation (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar)

  • Aptitude for self-directed, high-agency work. You take initiative and contribute proactively; we don't micromanage.

• Additional Skills
  This is a bucket list of relevant skills. It is not necessary to master all of them to work with us.

  • Experience with LLM observability tools like LangFuse or LiteLLM for tracking, monitoring, and debugging LLM applications

  • Configuration management tools (Ansible, Terraform, or similar)

  • Infrastructure monitoring and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)

  • Container security and vulnerability management

  • Familiarity with distributed LLM inference (vLLM)

Hiring Process

1. Apply with a CV and a cover letter. In the cover letter:

   1. Provide evidence of aptitude for self-directed high-agency work (<120 words)

   2. Provide evidence of exceptional ability in DevOps (<120 words)

   3. Describe relevant experience with Kubernetes, Nix, Python, and LLM observability (<120 words)

2. Paid test task

3. Paid trial day

4. Paid trial week (up to 2 weeks)
   

Compensation & Benefits

• Compensation: market rate for your country of work authorization, capped at Netherlands

• Comprehensive global health and dental insurance

• Coworking space stipend

• Fitness compensation (partial)