Lead Infrastructure Engineer

Summary

Join Pallon, a spin-off from ETH Zurich, and become a seasoned infrastructure engineer, taking full ownership of our infrastructure—from our high-performance GPU cluster to our cloud systems. You will lead critical decisions around architecture, performance, and scale, while also solving real-world issues. Collaborate closely with our platform and computer vision teams to ensure tools run fast, reliably, and securely. This hands-on role offers autonomy to shape how infrastructure comes together. You will design and build a custom GPU cluster, manage and scale infrastructure, keep systems running smoothly and securely, and make strategic decisions on automation. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of experience owning infrastructure end-to-end, ideally in startups, and is comfortable with all layers from bare-metal servers to cloud-native tools.

Requirements

• You’ve spent 5+ years owning infrastructure end-to-end, ideally in startup environments
• You’re comfortable at every layer — from bare-metal servers and NVMe drives to container orchestration and cloud-native tools
• You have strong Linux fundamentals, and you know your way around networking, storage, and distributed systems
• You can code well enough to automate, debug, and build tooling across a variety of languages
• You communicate clearly and collaborate well — especially with engineers who aren’t infra specialists
• You thrive with autonomy and can manage your own priorities effectively
• You’re curious and fast-learning, especially when tackling new tools or challenges
• You have a university degree in Computer Science or a related field

Responsibilities

• Design and build a custom GPU cluster for deep learning workloads
• Decide how we manage and scale our infrastructure — both on-prem and in the cloud
• Keep systems running smoothly and securely — from data pipelines to distributed training jobs
• Troubleshooting weird kernel errors, configuring systemd units, or debugging Kubernetes evictions
• Making calls on when to script, when to automate, and when to just fix the thing

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with machine learning infrastructure or HPC clusters
• Familiarity with data engineering workflows and ETL pipelines

Benefits

• Contribute to a positive impact on society and the environment
• Develop a novel product that changes a whole industry
• Be part of a motivated, smart, fun, and supportive team of software engineers and AI researchers
• Own a part of Pallon and have a part in our success with our Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP)
• Work from home or enjoy access to our beautiful office space located in Zürich