Senior Software Engineer I, Inference

About the role

Senior engineers are area owners who lead designs, raise engineering standards, and deliver measurable improvements to latency, throughput, and reliability across multiple services. They partner with product, orchestration, and hardware teams to evolve our Kubernetes-native inference platform and meet strict P99 SLAs at scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead design reviews and drive architecture within the team; decompose multi-service work into clear milestones.
• Define and own SLIs/SLOs; ensure post-incident actions land and reliability improves release-over-release.
• Implement advanced optimizations (e.g., micro-batch schedulers, speculative decoding, KV-cache reuse) and quantify impact.
• Strengthen incident posture: capacity planning, autoscaling policy, graceful degradation, rollback/traffic-shift strategies.
• Mentor IC1/IC2 engineers; review cross-team designs and elevate coding/testing standards.
• For IC4: own an area spanning multiple services and teams (e.g., request routing & adaptive scheduling, cost-per-token analytics, GPU resource isolation).

Requirements

• IC3: ~3–5 years; IC4: ~5–8 years industry experience building distributed systems or cloud services.
• Computer Science or Strong coding in Python or Go (C++ a plus) and deep familiarity with networked systems and performance.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes at production scale, CI/CD, and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Practical knowledge of inference internals: batching, caching, mixed precision (BF16/FP8), streaming token delivery.
• Proven track record improving tail latency (P95/P99) and service reliability through metrics-driven work.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS, EE, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).

Qualifications

• Preferred Contributions to inference frameworks (vLLM, Triton, TensorRT-LLM, Ray Serve, TorchServe).
• Experience with CUDA kernels, NCCL/SHARP, RDMA/NUMA, or GPU interconnect topologies.
• Leading multi-team initiatives or partnering with customers on mission-critical launches.