Software Engineer - Inference Platform

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 ship AI products. THE ROLE The AI ecosystem is being built by many companies at once: model labs creating increasingly capable models, hyperscalers providing infrastructure and distribution, developers building new AI products, and a growing ecosystem of tools that agents can use. Baseten sits at the center of that ecosystem as the inference platform developers use to run AI in production. Partner Engineering is how we connect those worlds. As one of the first engineers focused on Partner Engineering at Baseten, you'll build the technical foundation behind some of our most strategic relationships. You'll work directly with engineers at leading model labs, hyperscalers, developer platforms, and AI infrastructure companies to turn partnerships into products developers can actually use. You don't need a previous partner engineering title. We want an engineer who enjoys working directly with another company's technical team and carrying the resulting product decisions into production at Baseten. WHAT YOU'LL BUILD Bring new capabilities into Baseten. Integrate a search or developer-tools provider into Baseten so an agent can call the service during inference, with consistent authentication, execution, failure handling, observability, and usage reporting. Take Baseten into new distribution channels. Integrate Baseten with a hyperscaler, cloud marketplace, or developer platform so customers can discover models, provision access, and run inferenc

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. THE ROLE Baseten’s Inference Stack team builds the distributed runtime that powers large-scale LLM inference across our platform. We operate at the intersection of distributed systems, model performance, infrastructure, and developer experience. We enable customers to deploy and operate cutting-edge LLM models with industry-leading performance, scalability, reliability, and ease of use. As a Software Engineer on the Inference Stack team, you’ll work across the stack - from the developer experience customers use to deploy models, the libraries used for features like tool calling and reasoning, all the way down to the systems we use to orchestrate deployments in Kubernetes and route traffic efficiently. This is an ideal role for engineers who enjoy owning systems in production, solving hard integration problems, and making complex infrastructure simple and reliable for users. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Blog Posts https://www.baseten.co/blog/nvidia-dynamo-day-baseten-inference-stack/ https://www.baseten.co/blog/how-baseten-achieved-2x-faster-inference-with-nvidia-dynamo/ https://www.baseten.co/blog/how-baseten-multi-cloud-capacity-management-mcm-powers-cloud-self-hosted-and-hybr/#comparing-deployment-options-cloud-vs-self-hosted-vs-hybrid RESPONSIBILITIES Develop infrastructure and orchestration systems for deploying and managing large-scale distributed LLM inference Work across the stack, from customer-facing features to low-le

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 ship AI products. THE ROLE We're looking for inference performance engineers who want to make the world's most demanding AI workloads run faster and more efficiently. You'll work across the stack, from the inference engine and runtime through scheduling, serving, and routing. Along the way you'll apply techniques like prefill/decode disaggregation, speculative decoding, and KV-cache management. You'll reason from first principles about where time and memory go, find what's holding performance back, and close the gap. Your work directly impacts how fast our customers' models run and how efficiently we serve them. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in a fast-paced startup environment and is eager to make significant contributions to the exciting field of LLM inference. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES You'll get to work on these types of projects as an Inference Performance engineer: Agentic Kernels in Production How we built the new fastest API for GLM-5.2 Live draft model training for speculative decoding Making Kimi K3 Tokenization 18x faster The Baseten Inference Stack Driving model performance optimization RESPONSIBILITIES Implement and productionize cutting-edge inference techniques, working deep in runtime internals. That includes quantization, speculative decoding, KV-cache reuse, chunked prefill, LoRA, guided generation for structured outputs, and custom scheduling and routing algorithms. Profile and optimize inference end to end, from

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 ship AI products. THE ROLE As an Infrastructure Software Engineer at Baseten, you'll build and maintain components of our ML inference platform that powers production AI applications. You'll contribute to the core infrastructure, enabling developers to deploy, scale, and monitor ML models with high performance. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES You'll get to work on these types of projects as part of our Infrastructure team: Multi-cloud capacity management Inference on B200 GPUs Multi-node inference Fractional H100 GPUs for efficient model serving RESPONSIBILITIES Develop infrastructure components for our ML inference platform using Python and Go Implement and maintain Kubernetes deployments for model serving Contribute to our inference orchestration layer for model deployments Build and enhance monitoring systems for model performance metrics Implement efficient resource management solutions for ML workloads Support infrastructure automation to improve ML deployment workflows Work closely with team members to implement technical solutions Help balance performance optimization with system reliability Participate in technical discussions around infrastructure improvements Learn and apply infrastructure best practices REQUIREMENTS Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related field Proficient coding abilities in one or more popular programming or scripting languages; Go proficiency is a plus Working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerizati

About us Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor . Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace. About the role Sierra’s AI agents depend on foundation models to reason and act in real time. The Inference team builds the systems that make those models fast, reliable, and efficient at scale. As a Software Engineer on Inference, you’ll help define Sierra’s inference architecture across both self-hosted models and third-party inference providers. You’ll work on the systems responsible for serving and routing inference, managing capacity and quota, and optimizing for latency, reliability, and cost. This is a systems-first role at the intersection of distributed infrastructure and AI. You don’t need to be an ML researcher—we’re looking for engineers who love complex systems problems and are excited to apply that expertise to one of the fastest-moving areas

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 ship AI products. THE ROLE As an Engineer on the Dedicated Inference team, you'll shape the state-of-the-art developer experience for deploying and operating AI workloads in production. From the CLI and SDKs to APIs, observability, and debugging workflows, you'll build the tools customers rely on every day to manage mission-critical inference deployments. Few teams at Baseten have as much breadth and visibility as Dedicated Inference. The team is often at the forefront of new product development, giving engineers the opportunity to shape the experience of some of our most important customers. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES You'll get to work on these types of projects as part of our Dedicated Inference team: Chains for multi-component workflows Asynchronous inference Model APIs for frontier models Model training built for production inference RESPONSIBILITIES Implement new features and products for the team Design ergonomic APIs and abstractions to solve customer problems Fix bugs and resolve customer issues with urgency Work across the stack - regardless of where you start, you’ll end up touching both React Components and Kubernetes Pods Work closely with the product and forward deployed engineering teams to develop and drive new product ideas REQUIREMENTS Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related field Proficient coding abilities in one or more popular programming or scripting languages; Python, Go, or JavaScript proficiency is a