Staff / Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Serving

Location
San Francisco, Mountain View
Workplace
Remote
Compensation
$270k – $500k + equity
Visa
Visa Sponsorship Available

About this role

Who We're Looking For

A year ago, reliably working agentic systems and sub-second multimodal inference at scale barely existed. Nobody has a decade of experience here. So we're not screening for a resume template — we're looking for strong people from varied backgrounds who learn fast, thrive in ambiguity, and can show us what they've built, broken, and understood.

Experience We Find Useful

You don't need all of this. But you need enough to make a case.

Inference Optimization. Deep understanding of modern serving frameworks and techniques like vLLM or TRT-LLM.

Model Acceleration. Hands-on experience with quantization, distillation, caching strategies, continuous batching, paged attention, and speculative decoding.

High-Performance Systems. Proficiency in C++, CUDA, Rust, or highly optimized Python. You know how to profile code and squeeze every ounce of performance out of NVIDIA GPUs.

Distributed Systems & Scaling. Experience with Kubernetes, Ray, custom load balancing, multi-GPU/multi-node inference, and reliably handling thousands of concurrent connections.

Public work. Non-trivial systems programming projects, open-source contributions to major inference engines, or deep-dive technical write-ups.

Full-cycle ownership. You can take a model from the research team, containerize it, optimize its serving, and ensure it runs reliably in production.

Background. PhD in CS, Physics, Math, or equivalent practical experience building backend or ML systems.

Who Thrives Here

You don’t need a roadmap to start walking; you’re comfortable picking a direction and building the map as you go.

You believe engineering isn't finished until it’s shipped and stable. You have a bias for impact over purely theoretical optimizations.

You don't just ship code; you obsess over the why. You’re the first to question an architecture if you think there’s a better way to solve the core latency or throughput problem.

You aren't satisfied with "the PM said so." You thrive on deep context and want to understand the fundamental logic behind every decision we make.

What happens next

Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

A meeting lands on your calendar

When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.

Culture & values

Fast-paced and ownership-driven culture where people operate with high degree of autonomy

Direct access to senior leadership and CEO without layers of management

Company pays close attention to employee growth trajectory, promotions, and expanded impact

Stagnation is viewed as a red flag internally

Comfortable with ambiguity and energized by change

Culture of transparency and integrity in how company operates

Genuine flexibility around personal circumstances and timelines

Team actively uses AI tools in day-to-day work, not just in products

Startup-minded approach with real systems and processes in place

High degree of mutual respect among team members

Team rewards people who push themselves and the company forward

Tight-knit group of researchers, engineers, and go-to-market operators

Know someone who'd be great for this?