Senior Performance and Resilience Engineer - LLM Inference

Job Summary:

The Red Hat Performance and Scale Engineering team (PSAP) is hiring a hands-on performance and resilience engineer to lead the AI workloads fault injection and resilience at scale efforts for vLLM and llm-d (distributed LLM inference on Kubernetes/OpenShift). You will design and automate failure and resiliency experiments across vLLM llm-d and heterogeneous AI accelerators to harden Red Hats AI inference platforms against real-world incidents - without sacrificing throughput latency or cost efficiency. You will collaborate across performance devops and product engineering teams to define SLOs uncover weak signals before they become outages and convert findings into code runbooks and upstream contributions.

This role needs an experienced engineer that thinks creatively adapts to rapid change and has the willingness to learn and apply new technologies. You will be joining a vibrant open source culture and helping promote performance and innovation in this Red Hat engineering team. The border mission of the Performance and Scale team is to establish performance and scale leadership of the Red Hat product and cloud services portfolio. The scope includes component level system and solution analysis and targeted enhancements. The team collaborates with engineering product management product marketing and customer support as well as Red Hats hardware and software ecosystem partners.

At Red Hat our commitment to open source innovation extends beyond our products - it is embedded in how we work and grow. Red Hatters embrace change especially in our fast-moving technological landscape and have a strong growth mindset. Thats why we encourage our teams to proactively thoughtfully and ethically use AI to simplify their workflows cut complexity and boost efficiency. This empowers our associates to focus on higher-impact work creating smart more innovative solutions that solve our customers most pressing challenges.

What you will do:

• Own the resilience testing roadmap for vLLM and llm-d: define resilience indicators prioritize fault scenarios and establish go/no-go gates for releases and CI/CD

• Design GPU/accelerator-aware fault experiments that target vLLM and the stack beneath it (drivers GPU Operator/DevicePlugin NCCL/collectives storage/network paths NUMA/topology)

• Build an automated harness (preferably extending krkn-chaos) to run controlled experiments with scoped blast radius and evidence capture (logs traces metrics)

• Integrate fault signals into pipelines (GitHub Actions or otherwise) as resilience gates alongside performance gates

• Develop detection and diagnostics: dashboards and alerts for pre-fault signals (e.g. vLLM queue depth GPU throttling P2P downgrades KV-cache pressure allocator fragmentation)

• Triage and root-cause resilience regressions from field/customer issues; upstream bugs and fixes to vLLM and llm-d

• Explore and experiment with emerging AI technologies relevant to software development and testing proactively identifying opportunities to incorporate new AI capabilities into existing workflows and tooling.

• Publish learnings (internal/external): failure patterns playbooks SLO templates experiment libraries and reference architectures; present at internal/external forums

What you will bring:

• 3 years in reliability and/or performance engineering on large-scale distributed systems

• Expertise in systemslevel software design

• Expertise with Kubernetes and modern LLM inference server stack (e.g. vLLM TensorRT-LLM TGI)

• Observability & forensics skills with experience with Prometheus/Grafana OpenTelemetry tracing eBPF/BPFTrace/perf Nsight Systems PyTorch Profiler; adept at converting raw signals into actionable narratives.

• Fluency in Python (data & ML) strong Bash/Linux skills

• Exceptional communication skills - able to translate raw data into customer value and executive narratives

• Commitment to opensource values and upstream collaboration

The following is considered a plus:

• Masters or PhD in Computer Science AI or a related field

• History of upstream contributions and community leadership public talks or blogs on resilience or chaos engineering

• Competitive benchmarking and failure characterization at scale.

#LI-JS1

#AI-HIRING

Pay Transparency

Red Hat determines compensation based on several factors including but not limited to job location experience applicable skills and training external market value and internal pay equity. Annual salary is one component of Red Hats compensation package. This position may also be eligible for bonus commission and/or equity. For positions with Remote-US locations the actual salary range for the position may differ based on location but will be commensurate with job duties and relevant work experience.

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the worlds leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux cloud container and Kubernetes technologies. Spread across 40 countries our associates work flexibly across work environments from in-office to office-flex to fully remote depending on the requirements of their role. Red Hatters are encouraged to bring their best ideas no matter their title or tenure. Were a leader in open source because of our open and inclusive environment. We hire creative passionate people ready to contribute their ideas help solve complex problems and make an impact.

Benefits
Comprehensive medical dental and vision coverage
Flexible Spending Account - healthcare and dependent care
Health Savings Account - high deductible medical plan
Retirement 401(k) with employer match
Paid time off and holidays
Paid parental leave plans for all new parents
Leave benefits including disability paid family medical leave and paid military leave
Additional benefits including employee stock purchase plan family planning reimbursement tuition reimbursement transportation expense account employee assistance program and more!

Note: These benefits are only applicable to full time permanent associates at Red Hat located in the United States.

Inclusion at Red Hat
Red Hats culture is built on the open source principles of transparency collaboration and inclusion where the best ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. When this is realized it empowers people from different backgrounds perspectives and experiences to come together to share ideas challenge the status quo and drive innovation. Our aspiration is that everyone experiences this culture with equal opportunity and access and that all voices are not only heard but also celebrated. We hope you will join our celebration and we welcome and encourage applicants from all the beautiful dimensions that compose our global village.

Equal Opportunity Policy (EEO)
Red Hat is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and an affirmative action employer. We review applications for employment without regard to their race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity national origin ancestry citizenship age veteran status genetic information physical or mental disability medical condition marital status or any other basis prohibited by law.

Red Hat does not seek or accept unsolicited resumes or CVs from recruitment agencies. We are not responsible for and will not pay any fees commissions or any other payment related to unsolicited resumes or CVs except as required in a written contract between Red Hat and the recruitment agency or party requesting payment of a fee.

Red Hat supports individuals with disabilities and provides reasonable accommodations to job applicants. If you need assistance completing our online job application email . General inquiries such as those regarding the status of a job application will not receive a reply.