Member of Technical Staff (AI Inference Engineer)
Posted Apr 13, 2026·Open for 87 days (and counting)
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Key details
Function
Research
Seniority
Mid
Workplace
On-site
Location
San Francisco, United States
Specialty
Inference
Tech stack
RustPythonCudaCutePytorchJaxTensorflowTritonCutlassNcclKubernetes
Job Description
We build and run the inference engine behind every Perplexity query and deploy dozens of model architectures at scale with tight latency and cost budgets. Our stack is Rust, Python, CUDA, and CuTe DSL - and we need another engineer to join us.
WHAT YOU WILL WORK ON
Examples of real work the team does:
- New models support. Support transformer-based retrieval, text-generation, and multimodal models in our inference infrastructure, from weight loading, request scheduling and KV-cache management to support in API Gateway.
- GPU kernels migration to CuTe DSL. Port our in-house CUDA kernels to NVIDIA's CuTe DSL so they run on GB200 today and are portable to Vera Rubin racks tomorrow.
- Rust-native serving runtime. Develop our internal Rust-based inference server to solve all Python pains and keep up with rapidly growing traffic.
- Performance optimisation. Profile and fix bottlenecks from network ingress through continuous batching and GPU kernel interleaving.
- Reliability and observability. Build dashboards, alerts, and automated remediation so we catch regressions before users do. Respond to and learn from production incidents.
WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Deep experience with GPU programming and performance work (CUDA, Triton, CUTLASS, or similar). Any other deep systems programming experience is a plus.
- You understand modern LLM architectures and are able to bring them up reliably in a production environment.
- You've built and operated production distributed systems under real load - ideally performance-critical ones.
- Comfortable working across languages and layers: Rust for the serving runtime, Python for model code, CUDA/CuteDSL for kernels.
- You own problems end-to-end. You can read a research paper on Monday, write a kernel on Wednesday, and debug a production incident on Friday.
- Self-directed. You do well in fast-moving environments where the path forward isn't laid out for you.
GOOD IF YOU TOUCHED ANY OF
- ML compilers and framework internals: PyTorch internals, torch.compile, custom operators.
- Distributed GPU communication: NCCL, NVLink, InfiniBand, RDMA libraries, model/tensor parallelism.
- Low-precision inference: INT8/FP8/FP4 quantization, mixed-precision serving.
- Profiling and debugging tools: Nsight Compute/Systems, CUDA-GDB, PTX/SASS analysis.
- Container orchestration: Kubernetes, GPU scheduling, autoscaling inference workloads.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience with meaningful work on ML inference or high-performance systems.
- Familiarity with at least one deep learning framework (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow).
- Understanding of GPU architectures (memory hierarchy, warp scheduling, tensor cores).
- Understanding of common LLM architectures and inference optimization techniques (e.g. quantization, speculative decoding, prefill-decode disaggregation).
Audit details(provenance, verification trail, raw fields)
Core fields
Posting ID
perplexity:8a976851-9bef-4b07-8d36-567fa9540aefTitle
Member of Technical Staff (AI Inference Engineer)
Function
Research
Location
San Francisco
Workplace mode
unspecified
Posted at
2026-04-13 19:39:49Z
Compensation
undisclosed
Provenance
First seen (our tracker)
2026-06-15 05:23:45Z
Last seen
2026-07-10 07:08:45Z
Last updated
2026-07-10 07:08:45Z
Removed at
still open
Days open
Open for 87 days (and counting)
ATS adapter
ashby
ATS slug
perplexityVerification trail
This posting hasn't been probed by our closure verifier yet. Stream C runs on a rolling schedule against postings approaching the close-decision threshold.
LLM enrichment
Enriched at 2026-06-17 07:22:24Z. Enrichment runs once per posting, never re-runs.
Seniority
ic_l3
Role archetype
engineering
Specialty
inference
Workplace mode
unknown
City (normalized)
San Francisco
Country (normalized)
United States
Comp range
—
Tech stack
rustpythoncudacutepytorchjaxtensorflowtritoncutlassncclkubernetes
Novel role archetype?
no
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