Systems Software Engineer - AI Infrastructure

To make electronics, you need chips, wafers, transistors, reticles, and... To make these, you must see, test and manufacture them at scale—faster and better than ever before. That's where KLA comes in. Whether you're early in your career or an experienced professional, you'll solve complex challenges, work alongside brilliant minds and help shape the future of technology.

Group/Division

The Semiconductor Products and Customers (Semi PC) business unit designs, builds and sells KLA’s product portfolio to help chip manufacturers meet high-quality standards for technologies like AI, data centers, automotive and electronic devices. Our inspection, metrology, and analytics systems detect and monitor defects across logic and memory chips, specialty semiconductors, wafers, reticles, advanced packaging, process equipment and materials. We also develop technologies for specialty processes, IC substrates, and PCB manufacturing, including etch and deposition, component inspection, and imaging and analytics. At KLA, physics and data are at the core of everything we do. Our AI and Modeling Center of Excellence drives innovation across KLA products by combining expertise in physics modeling, high-performance computing (HPC) and AI. The group is comprised of top-tier physicists, machine learning engineers, HPC architects and data scientists that collaborate to develop scalable, cutting-edge solutions for our customers. We’re hiring across multiple disciplines—this is your opportunity to make a global impact.

What You'll Do

In this role, you will play a key part in advancing business priorities by delivering high-impact work across your area of expertise.

As an Systems Software Engineer - AI Infrastructure, you will research, evaluate, and develop next-generation hardware and software technologies that enable large-scale AI and machine learning workloads across KLA. You will help design and build the infrastructure that powers model training, inference, networking, storage, data protection, and emerging agentic AI systems. This role sits at the intersection of systems engineering, AI platform development, MLOps, and DevOps, ensuring that AI teams have reliable, scalable, high-performance infrastructure to develop, train, deploy, and operate AI solutions. You will also define and develop reference architectures and platform standards that can be embraced across KLA products and engineering organizations, enabling secure, cost-effective, and repeatable AI infrastructure deployments.

Responsibilities

• Design & Build AI Infrastructure: Architect, deploy, and operate scalable, secure, and cost-effective AI platforms, distributed training environments, and model serving systems.
• Research & Innovation: Evaluate emerging technologies in AI infrastructure, compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and security, and develop reference designs for enterprise adoption.
• Hardware & Software Orchestration: Bring up, integrate, and lead AI compute infrastructure while diagnosing hardware, firmware, operating system, and platform issues.
• Data & Storage Management: Design and maintain high-performance storage, networking, and data pipelines supporting large-scale AI workloads.
• Performance & Reliability: Develop observability and monitoring solutions, optimize AI workload performance, and ensure infrastructure meets reliability and availability targets.
• Security & Compliance: Implement security-by-design principles including encryption, identity and access management, secrets management, and AI data security. Contribute to the architecture and implementation capabilities for protecting AI workloads, intellectual property, and sensitive data at KLA.
• Collaboration: Partner with AI researchers, data scientists, software engineers, IT, and security teams to align platform capabilities with business and product needs.

Tools you will use in the role:

• Technical Skills: Linux administration, Kubernetes/Docker, Slurm, Ray, TensorFlow, PyTorch, GPU/TPU optimization, containerization, orchestration, and programming skills.
• Infrastructure Knowledge: High speed networking, storage systems, virtualization, and server management.
• AI/ML Integration: Understanding of model training, fine‑tuning, RAG pipelines, and agentic AI systems
• Automation & Scripting: Bash, Python, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC).
• Security: TPM-based encryption, Kubernetes security (RBAC, OPA/Gatekeeper), container security.

Qualifications:

• Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field
• 5–8 years in systems engineering, DevOps, or ML infrastructure
• Hands‑on experience building AI/GPU cluster

Minimum Qualifications

Doctorate (Academic) Degree and 0 years related work experience; Master's Level Degree and related work experience of 3 years; Bachelor's Level Degree and related work experience of 5 years

About KLA

We provide advanced inspection tools, metrology systems, process solutions, and computational analytics that make electronics possible, tackling complex challenges. From electron and photon optics to machine learning and data analytics, we seek perfection at the most fundamental level of matter in the universe. If you want to make electronics that push industries forward and make the world a better place, join us.

Total Rewards

Base Pay Range: $136,300.00 - $199,900.00 Annually Primary Location: USA-CA-Milpitas-KLA

KLA’s total rewards package for employees may also include participation in performance incentive programs and eligibility for additional benefits including but not limited to: medical, dental, vision, life, and other voluntary benefits, 401(K) including company matching, employee stock purchase program (ESPP), student debt assistance, tuition reimbursement program, development and career growth opportunities and programs, financial planning benefits, wellness benefits including an employee assistance program (EAP), paid time off and paid company holidays, and family care and bonding leave.
Interns are eligible for some of the benefits listed. Our pay ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed reflects the pay for this position in the primary location identified in this posting. Actual pay depends on several factors, including state minimum pay wage rates, location, job-related skills, experience, and relevant education level or training. We are committed to complying with all applicable federal and state minimum wage requirements where applicable. If applicable, your recruiter can share more about the specific pay range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Use of AI Statement 

At KLA, our interviews seek to understand your individual skills, problem-solving approach and authentic thinking. To ensure a fair and consistent evaluation, the use of AI, recording tools or other technologies to generate, suggest or provide responses during interviews—whether virtual or in person—is not permitted unless explicitly approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation or invited by the interviewer. Use of these tools may interfere with our ability to evaluate your individual qualifications and affect your candidacy. KLA is committed to advancing innovation through responsible AI, and we value candidates who share this mindset.

Equal Opportunity Statement

KLA is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We will ensure that qualified individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us at [email protected] or at +1-408-352-2808 to request accommodation.

For additional information, view the US Know Your Rights poster on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website.