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Expertise · AI infrastructure recruiting

Platform, SRE and Observability Recruiting

We recruit platform engineers, site reliability engineers and observability engineers for teams running AI and GPU compute in production. We run each as its own search and screen on what the person owned, the scale they supported and the incidents they handled.

Audience

We work with GPU cloud and compute platforms, AI product companies, enterprises running internal platforms, and operators with availability targets in customer contracts.

Common hiring problems

  • Researchers and product engineers are maintaining their own infrastructure surface.
  • Availability targets are now in customer contracts, and nobody owns reliability.
  • The team has dashboards but can't attribute usage to a specific job or tenant.
  • One requisition is asking for platform, reliability and deployment engineering at once.

Role families

Roles and screening

Platform engineering

Platform engineer, infrastructure engineer, developer platform lead

The internal tools they built, how other teams adopted them and the manual work they removed.

Site reliability

SRE, production engineer, reliability lead, incident commander

Error budget practice, on-call design, incident command and postmortem discipline under real customer-facing targets.

Infrastructure observability

Observability engineer, telemetry platform engineer

Cardinality and cost control, trace coverage, and attribution of resource use to jobs, tenants and teams.

Distributed systems

Distributed systems engineer, control plane engineer

Consistency, coordination and failure reasoning in systems they have operated.

Environments

Technologies and environments

  • Kubernetes control planes and multi-tenant clusters
  • Terraform, service meshes and internal developer platforms
  • Prometheus, OpenTelemetry and trace-based observability
  • Error budgets, SLOs and on-call rotations
  • Capacity, quota and cost attribution across shared compute

Role scope

Requirement mistakes

Sort these out before outreach starts.

  • Writing one job description covering platform, reliability and customer-facing engineering.
  • Hiring reliability ownership before there is a service and a target to be reliable against.
  • Screening SRE candidates on coding puzzles without asking about incidents they owned.
  • Expecting a platform hire to also own model training pipelines.

Process

Search process

Czarina Tabayoyong agrees on the scorecard with your interview panel, builds a list of named candidates and contacts them directly. You get a written report every week. At the end, your team keeps all the research and the candidate pipeline. We use AI tools for research, and Czarina makes the recommendations herself.

FAQ

Recruiting questions

What is the difference between platform engineering and SRE?
Platform engineers build and own the internal tools other teams use. SREs own availability outcomes: error budgets, on-call, incident response and the reliability work that follows a postmortem. Some organizations combine them. We screen for different things in each and write the criteria down before sourcing.
Where does observability sit?
Usually inside platform or reliability, as a separate hire. Observability engineers own data quality, cost and attribution, so you can see GPU utilization and usage by tenant.
Do you recruit for on-call heavy roles?
Yes. We describe the on-call rotation in the first conversation, because candidates who learn about it late turn down offers or leave early.
Can you build the scorecard with our engineers?
Yes. On every engagement we agree on the scorecard with the engineers on your interview panel and write it down before outreach begins.

Next step

Bring the scorecard and the deadline. We'll tell you what the candidate market looks like and which engagement we'd recommend, including when your team can fill the role internally.