Software Engineer — GPU Networking & Distributed Systems

About Baseten

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products.

At Baseten, we are building the global operating system for distributed, heterogeneous AI hardware. We believe that as LLM and multi-modal workloads scale, the network is the computer. We are looking for foundational engineers to lead our GPU Networking efforts, making RDMA a first-class building block in our infrastructure and unlocking the next generation of distributed inference optimizations.

The Opportunity

Networking and compute are no longer separate disciplines; they are converging. The massive throughput of H100, B200, and NVL72 architectures enables and demands a new approach where communication is co-optimized alongside computation. We are entering an era where the network is an active accelerator, leveraging smart hardware offloads and direct interconnects to ensure that data movement operates at wire-speed.

In this role, you will go beyond network configuration to architect the software fabric that unifies thousands of GPUs into a cohesive operating system. While you will leverage the best of the open-source ecosystem, you won't be limited by it. Where off-the-shelf solutions stop, you will build from scratch, engineering the primitives required to co-optimize communication and compute for Disaggregated Serving, Wide Expert Parallelism (WideEP), and lightning cold starts.

Responsibilities

• Make RDMA First-Class: Integrate RDMA/RoCE/InfiniBand capabilities directly into our inference stack, moving beyond TCP/IP to unlock order-of-magnitude improvements in bandwidth and latency.
• Optimize Distributed Inference: Implement and tune the networking layers necessary for efficient Disaggregated KV Cache Offload and WideEP, ensuring seamless communication across NVLink and InfiniBand for our MoE models.
• Enable Serverless-Grade Startup Speeds for LLMs: Work deeply with checkpointing and storage mechanisms to enable sub-10-second startup for trillion-parameter models.
• Deep-Dive into Hardware: Characterize and validate networking performance on bleeding-edge clusters (H100/H200, B200/B300, GB200/300 NVL72), writing the acceptance tests that ensure our hardware delivers peak achievable throughput and minimal latency.
• Build Observability: Design tools to visualize packet flow, congestion, and effective bandwidth across the GPU interconnects, helping diagnose complex distributed system behaviors.
• Optimize Kernels: Work with communication libraries (NCCL, NVSHMEM) and potentially write custom communication kernels to overlap compute and data transfer.

Requirements

• Deep experience with high-performance networking protocols (InfiniBand, RoCE v2) and understanding of the physics of data movement.
• Fluency in C++ or Python, with the ability to bridge the gap between high-level logic and hardware.
• Deep understanding of the memory hierarchy in modern NVIDIA architectures (H100/Blackwell) and how to optimize for it.
• Willingness to dive deep into TensorRT-LLM source code, write custom C++/Python bindings, or debug NVLink topology issues.
• Ability to discern when to use off-the-shelf solutions and when to build custom solutions because upstream tools (like standard Kubernetes networking) are too slow for our needs.

Qualifications

• Highly Preferred: Deep knowledge of NCCL, NVSHMEM, and UCX.
• Experience with Rust for systems-level or performance-critical networking code is a strong plus.
• Experience with GPUDirect Storage (GDS) or high-performance filesystems like Weka or 3FS.
• Familiarity with TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, or Sglang.
• Experience running low-level benchmarks to "qualify" new hardware clusters.

Why Join the Model Performance Team?

• Bleeding Edge Hardware: Prepare to bring Blackwell (B200/B300) and then Rubin architectures online. You will be one of the first engineers in the industry optimizing networking for NVL72/GB300 racks.
• We go deep: Operate at every depth—tuning hardware interconnects, writing custom communication kernels, or designing distributed inference strategies—across the entire stack to deliver performance that goes far beyond.
• High Impact: The networking optimizations you build will directly enable features that no one else in the industry has fully mastered yet, like seamless multi-node WideEP and instant model hydration.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents.
• Flexible PTO policy including company-wide Winter Break (offices closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day).
• Paid parental leave.
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot.
• Company-facilitated 401(k).
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

Pay

Compensation Range: $165K - $330K