Applied Ai Engineer in San Francisco

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 Are you passionate about advancing the application of artificial intelligence? We are looking for a Software Engineer focused on ML performance to join our dynamic team. 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. If you are a backend engineer who thrives on making things faster and is excited about open-source ML models, we look forward to your application. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES You'll get to work on these types of projects as part of our Model Performance team: Baseten Embeddings Inference: The fastest embeddings solution available The Baseten Inference Stack Driving model performance optimization RESPONSIBILITIES Implement, refine, and productionize cutting-edge techniques (quantization, speculative decoding, kv cache reuse, chunked prefill and LoRA) for ML model inference and infrastructure. Deep dive into underlying codebases of TensorRT, PyTorch, TensorRT-LLM, vllm, sglang, CUDA, and other libraries to debug ML performance issues. Apply and scale optimization techniques across a wide range of ML models, particularly large language models. Collaborate with a diverse team to design and implement innovative solutions. Own projects from idea to production. REQUIREMENTS Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field. Experience with one

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 As a Software Engineer on the Internal Tooling team, you will own the internal operating system that sits at the heart of how Baseten operates. Capacity helps unlock revenue by carefully balancing supply and demand. The operating system manages all aspects of the customer lifecycle: from onboarding to managing complex customer SLA requirements. This role is for engineers who want to own a product end to end, not just implement tickets. You will work directly with the Capacity, Sales, and Engineering teams to understand requirements, define solutions, and ship software that removes friction from some of the most high-stakes workflows in the company. If something is slow, manual, or error-prone in the capacity fulfillment lifecycle, you will be the one to fix it. You are a strong fit if you have strong product intuition, move fast without sacrificing quality, and take satisfaction in building tools that make the people around you measurably more effective. RESPONSIBILITIES Own the Capacity product end to end: scoping, design, implementation, and iteration based on feedback from internal stakeholders Translate complex operational requirements from Capacity, Sales, and SRE teams into clean, ergonomic product experiences Build and maintain full-stack features across the Capacity toolchain, including UI surfaces, APIs, and backend services Identify workflow bottlenecks and manual processes across the capacity lifecy

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 We’re looking for a seasoned Frontend Engineer to craft performant and delightful user experiences across Baseten’s core platform. You’ll own critical parts of our web application stack and collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and backend teams to launch impactful features that help users deploy and manage AI systems at scale. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES You'll get to work on these types of projects as part of our Core Product team: Rolling Deployments Model APIs for frontier models Model training built for production inference RESPONSIBILITIES Design, implement, and maintain responsive, accessible, and user-friendly frontend interfaces using React and TypeScript Collaborate closely with product designers to turn complex ideas into elegant, intuitive UIs Optimize application performance and reliability, with a focus on rendering speed and responsiveness Drive major frontend initiatives, including partnering with backend teams to define APIs and test and refine end-to-end flows Establish best practices, and mentor other engineers on frontend technologies Build reusable component libraries and frontend infrastructure that accelerate product development Partner with backend and platform teams to define and refine APIs and end-to-end flows REQUIREMENTS 5+ years of experience building production-grade web applications Deep expertise in React, TypeScript, and modern web development tooling Track record of bu

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 As an OS / K8s Systems Engineer at Baseten, you’ll build the automation and systems that turn raw GPU hardware into production-ready compute. From provisioning to orchestration, you’ll own the software layer that makes our infrastructure reproducible, scalable, and reliable across data centers. This is a senior, hands-on role focused on building systems not operating them. You’ll work close to the metal designing OS images, building provisioning pipelines, and automating cluster bring-up from scratch. Your work will define how quickly we can turn new capacity into usable compute. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Zero-to-cluster automation Build workflows that take new hardware from unprovisioned to fully operational cluster. Provisioning systems Design PXE-based or equivalent systems for imaging and lifecycle management. Reproducible infrastructure — Ensure clusters deploy consistently across data centers. RESPONSIBILITIES Own the end-to-end automation of cluster bring-up and lifecycle management. Build and maintain OS images, provisioning systems, and configuration pipelines. Deploy and operate cluster orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, Slurm, or similar). Design systems for reproducibility across sites and hardware generations. Automate upgrades, rollouts, and failure recovery. Optimize system performance, including GPU utilization and networking. Partner with hardware and network teams to validate and improve system b

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 We’re seeking a GPU Kernel Engineer to join our team at the cutting edge of AI acceleration, where your code directly impacts the performance of state-of-the-art machine learning models. As a GPU Kernel Engineer, you'll craft the foundation that powers modern AI workloads, optimizing every microsecond of computation to enable breakthrough applications. You'll work in a fast-paced, intellectually stimulating environment where technical excellence is paramount and your contributions directly influence production systems serving millions of users across numerous products. This role offers exceptional growth potential for engineers passionate about low-level optimization and high-impact systems work. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES You'll get to work on these types of projects as part of our Model Performance team: Baseten Embeddings Inference: The fastest embeddings solution available The Baseten Inference Stack Driving model performance optimization RESPONSIBILITIES Core Engineering Responsibilities Design and implement high-performance GPU kernels for key ML operations, including matrix multiplications, attention mechanisms, and mixture-of-experts routing Write and optimize code using CUDA, PTX assembly, and architecture-specific techniques Apply advanced performance optimization methods such as memory coalescing, warp-level programming, tensor core acceleration, and compute/memory overlap Performance & Innovation Impl

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 is seeking talented and experienced Software Engineers to join our Observability team within the Infrastructure organization. As an early member of the Observability Team, you will be pivotal in building and shaping the observability experience for our internal and external customers. By joining this team, you’ll have a direct impact on the reliability and operational excellence of Basetens product systems. As Baseten scales its infrastructure across different cloud providers and diverse hardware, the volume and complexity of operational data is growing by orders of magnitude. This team is responsible for building high-throughput ingest pipelines, cost-efficient storage, and agentic diagnostic tools to ensure that we can detect, diagnose, and resolve issues in minutes rather than hours, even as the systems they operate become more complex. RESPONSIBILITIES Design and build scalable telemetry ingest and storage pipelines for metrics, logs, and traces across Baseten’s multi-cloud infrastructure Own and evolve core observability platforms, driving migrations and architectural improvements that improve reliability, reduce cost, and scale with organizational growth Build instrumentation libraries, SDKs, and integrations that make it easy for engineering teams to emit high-quality telemetry from their services Drive alerting and SLO infrastructure that enables teams to define, monitor, and respond to reliabi

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 is seeking talented and experienced Software Engineers to join our Platform team within the Infrastructure organization. As an early member of Baseten's Platform Team, you will be pivotal in building internal infrastructure to support our engineering organization. You will own the deployment platform, release pipelines, and rollout safety mechanisms that allow engineers across Baseten to deploy changes rapidly while minimizing operational risk. Our mission is to make production deployments fast, safe, and increasingly autonomous. If you are passionate about elegant solutions—like streamlined monorepos, lightning-fast CI pipelines, and thoughtfully designed shared libraries—you'll thrive at Baseten. RESPONSIBILITIES Design and build continuous deployment infrastructure that safely rolls out changes across dozens of Kubernetes clusters and global regions. Develop systems for progressive delivery, including canary releases, staged rollouts, and automated rollback. Improve engineering velocity by reducing friction in the release pipeline and automating manual operational workflows. Work with product and infrastructure teams to ensure their services are deployable, observable, and resilient at scale. Implement and evolve deployment methodologies such as GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, and progressive delivery patterns. Build systems that automatically evaluate deployment health using metrics, logs, traces,

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 is building its own GPU infrastructure for large-scale inference. As we move into large scale, high-density NVIDIA systems, the hardest failures are intermittent, cross-layer, and difficult to prove: RoCE congestion, InfiniBand stalls, ECN/DCQCN mis-tuning, bad optics, RNIC issues, host kernel stalls, GPU driver problems, and workload symptoms that look like network problems, but are not. We are hiring a Lead Software Engineer to build a first-class observability and root-cause analysis system for GPU fabrics. This is a hard distributed systems problem, not a dashboarding problem. The system will collect high-volume signals from switches, hosts, active probes, and inference services; reduce and correlate them in real time; understand topology and service ownership; and produce actionable diagnosis while an incident is still unfolding. This role sits at the boundary between networking and inference software. RDMA data paths, GPUDirect transfers, prefill/decode disaggregation, KV cache movement, request routing, and workload backpressure can all create fabric symptoms or hide real fabric failures. The goal is to tell an operator, quickly and with evidence, whether an incident is caused by the fabric, host, NIC, GPU, RDMA path, scheduler, or serving layer — and what to do next. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Real-time telemetry engine — Build the ingestion, reduction, storage, and query path for high-cardinality fab

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. We are looking for an engineer with strong experience in machine learning and solid foundations in maths and computer science to join our growing Post-Training team at Baseten. Custom models are instrumental to the success of Baseten customers. By inference volume, the overwhelming majority of traffic at Baseten is to and from models that have been post-trained in some way, whether that be through reinforcement learning, supervised finetuning, a recent technique from the literature, or an in-house research technique from Baseten. The Post-Training team is responsible for the success of our customers’ post-trained models, and we employ a wide array of techniques to produce models that are more efficient and higher quality than even the biggest closed source models for the customer’s specific needs. Your role as a research engineer is to build the in-house tooling to support all of this. We care about training a wide spectrum of different model architectures with a variety of techniques efficiently and at scale. At times this involves zooming deep into a particular technical topic, but more often if involves working across the stack as a whole - systems-level concepts like Kubernetes, cgroups, storage systems, and networking topologies, as well as PyTorch distributed tensor computation, and GPU kernels. RECENT RESEARCH Dense, on-policy or both? Repeated kv cache for long-running agents Distillation without the dark – rep

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 to ship AI products. THE ROLE We’re looking for a customer-obsessed software engineer to come ship with us. You’ll own features like multi-node training and products like serverless reinforcement learning (RL) from conception to MVP (and from MVP to GA!). You’ll work through the stack, architecting solutions from API and UI down to our infrastructure layer. You’ll fine tune models yourself to develop an understanding of user workflows. You’ll work closely with research engineers leveraging state-of-the-art training techniques to build experiences that accelerate model development and solve for real pain points. If you’re excited to dive deep into the training, let’s talk! THE PRODUCT Take a look at what we’ve built so far: Overview of the product so far Training docs overview Story of the Training product Research we've done EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Checkpointing Pipeline: Our checkpointing pipeline starts with automated checkpointing, a feature that ensures that versions of models created during training are automatically backed up to the cloud. Users are able to then deploy checkpoints seamlessly into inference servers, providing point-and-click integrations into inference frameworks like vLLM and Baseten’s Inference Stack. This enables customers to quickly evaluate the performance of their checkpoints with real traffic. Multinode training: Multinode training enables customers to easily run training jobs across multiple compute nodes, enablin

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 Model Performance (MP) team is responsible for ensuring the models running on our platform are fast, reliable, and cost‑efficient. As part of this team, you’ll focus on Model APIs — the infrastructure powering our hosted API endpoints for the latest open‑source models. This work spans distributed systems, model serving, and developer experience. You’ll join a small, high‑impact team operating at the intersection of product, model performance, and infra, helping to define how developers interact with AI models at scale. RESPONSIBILITIES: Design, build, and operate the Model APIs surface with focus on advanced inference capabilities: structured outputs (JSON mode, grammar-constrained generation), tool/function calling and multi-modal serving Profile and optimize TensorRT-LLM kernels, analyze CUDA kernel performance, implement custom CUDA operators, tune memory allocation patterns for maximum throughput and optimize communication patterns across multi-GPU setups Productionize performance improvements across runtimes with deep understanding of their internals: speculative decoding implementations, guided generation for structured outputs, custom scheduling and routing algorithms for high-performance serving Build comprehensive benchmarking frameworks that measure real-world performance across different model architectures, batch sizes, sequence lengths, and hardware configurations Productionize performa

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 OPPORTUNITY We are looking for Senior Software Engineers to join our team. This is a specialized, high-impact role sitting at the intersection of high-performance computing (HPC) and Large Language Model (LLM) engineering. You will not just be building the automated "speedometer and diagnostic" suite for our next-generation AI infrastructure; you will be defining the roadmap, driving key technical decisions, and taking full ownership of the future of this work. RESPONSIBILITIES Benchmarking : Evaluate, run and automate standard LLM quality benchmarks (GSM8K, MMLU) alongside custom performance suites for specific workloads (e.g., long-context window, KV cache reuse, disaggregated serving). DevEx Improvement : Develop and maintain internal GPU-enabled development environments (similar to GitHub Codespaces). You will ensure the team has seamless, high-performance "dev machines" optimized for model experimentation. Tool Development : Build and contribute to open-source tools such as InferenceMAX and genai-bench to automate model evaluation, benchmarking and analysis. System Profiling : Use profilers like PyTorch Profiler, NVIDIA Nsight Systems and py-spy to collect performance profiles, identify bottlenecks, and debug the compute/networking stack. Monitoring & Observability : Develop real-time dashboards and alerts to monitor system health, model startup times, and runtime performance. Continuous Integration : Auto

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 lightening cold starts. WHAT YOU'LL DO Make RDMA First-Class: You will work on integrating RDMA/RoCE/InfiniBand capabilities directly into our inference stack,

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 The largest, most demanding enterprises are starting to run on Baseten, and they arrive with a range of security, compliance, and procurement requirements. As a Senior Engineer on Baseten's enterprise engineering team, you'll build the capabilities that enable large organizations like Writer, HubSpot, and Notion to succeed on Baseten. Enterprise engineering authors the core building blocks, APIs, and user experiences powering the Baseten platform: identity and access management, billing, regional isolation, and self-hosted and single-tenant deployment options. This is deep product and systems work across the full stack, from designing authentication and authorization systems using standards like OAuth and OIDC to shipping the admin experiences enterprise IT teams use to manage their organization. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Recent and upcoming work on the team: Fine-grained authorization for users, service accounts, and agentic workloads SSO and SCIM support, allowing customers to centralize and automate access to Baseten Expanding the billing platform to support evolving pricing models, advanced data exports, and controls to manage spend In-product management and enforcement of customer compliance requirements like data residency and HIPAA Securing network paths in and out of a customer's models with private connectivity and ingress and egress restrictions Allowing customers to run Baseten inside their own VPC, on-pr