Inference Technical Lead 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 We’re hiring a Data Engineer to build and scale Baseten’s internal data platform. This role sits at the intersection of data engineering, analytics, and data science, transforming raw product and business data into reliable datasets that power decision-making. You’ll design the data models, pipelines, and analytics infrastructure that enable teams across Product, Engineering, Finance, Marketing, and Sales to understand usage and performance. This includes working with AI inference, infrastructure, and observability data to generate insights about the product, business operations and platform economics. You’ll partner closely with stakeholders to build robust, scalable pipelines, define company-wide metrics that inform strategy and planning. RESPONSIBILITIES Design and maintain core data models and semantic layers Develop and orchestrate batch and streaming data pipelines using technologies such as Apache Beam, Kafka, Airflow, or similar frameworks Analyze inference and infrastructure telemetry , including data from OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and other observability tools Define and maintain company-wide metrics across product usage, performance, and customer lifecycle Enable self-service analytics through agents and tools, with well-structured semantic layers and context Ensure data reliability and quality through testing, documentation, and governance PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS Understanding of inference metrics s

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 This role sits at the frontier of our research agenda. You will pursue open problems at the intersection of post-training methodology and performant inference, and then collaborate with research engineering to translate findings into production systems. A meaningful portion of your time will be dedicated to research that deepens our understanding of how models learn, alignment, and architectural efficiency — questions that may not have immediate product application. The remainder will be directed toward research that solves concrete problems for Baseten's platform and customers, who are the fastest growing AI companies in the world like Cursor, Lovable, and Notion. We are looking for someone with sharp research taste and genuine creative instinct for problem selection. Someone who can identify questions that matter, design clean experiments to answer them, and push the state of the art. The environment here is not theoretical, but rather research that can be validated with eager customers who are serving billions of tokens a second. RECENT RESEARCH Towards infinite context windows: neural KV cache compaction Dense, on-policy or both? Repeated kv cache for long-running agents Distillation without the dark – replicating black-box on-policy distillation on Baseten RESPONSIBILITIES Define and pursue a research agenda spanning both foundational and applied work, with the applied component connected to Baseten's pla

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

About the Team The GPT Infrastructure team builds systems that turn advances in model inference and optimization into reliable production capabilities. We enable OpenAI workloads to be qualified and optimized across new accelerator platforms without requiring a one-off port and tuning effort for every hardware target. Our work spans distributed systems, model execution, compilers and runtimes, performance engineering, secure partner integrations, evaluation systems, and developer tooling. We build the infrastructure that makes optimization workflows automated, reproducible, and trustworthy. About the Role We are seeking a software engineer to help build the platform that qualifies and optimizes inference workloads across heterogeneous compute environments. You will develop both OpenAI-hosted services and secure partner-side software for running long-lived optimization workflows. These workflows generate candidate kernels, runtime configurations, and serving-stack changes; compile and execute them on target hardware; verify their correctness; measure their performance; and use the results to guide further optimization. You will work across model architecture, distributed execution, compilers, runtimes, networking, and accelerator systems. A central part of the role is turning research prototypes and one-off hardware bring-up efforts into reliable, reusable infrastructure with clear contracts, reproducible results, strong observability, and well-defined security boundaries. Key Responsibilities Design, build, and operate APIs and control-plane services for long-running workload qualification and optimization campaigns, including scheduling, retries, checkpointing, resource budgets, and observability. Build secure partner-side execution and evaluation software that can compile, run, verify, profile, and benchmark candidate artifacts on accelerator hardware. Integrate model workloads, hardware profiles, compiler toolchains, runtimes, serving engines, and distributed-exe

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role You will build the model runtime within the inference engine that executes complex, frontier models at scale on OpenAI’s custom silicon. The runtime will sit between models running on the hardware and the upper layers of the cluster serving software stack, translating demanding inference workloads into efficient execution while optimizing for throughput, latency, utilization, and reliability. You will work across model architecture, distributed systems, compilers, kernels, and silicon to design a production-grade runtime comparable in ambition to systems such as vLLM and SGLang, but customized and optimized for OpenAI’s AI accelerator. Your work will shape how new model capabilities map onto the platform and how quickly custom silicon can deliver meaningful performance in production. In this role, you will: Design and implement the LLM inference runtime for frontier models running on custom silicon. Build scheduling, continuous batching, memory management, KV-cache management, and execution orchestration for high-performance inference. Develop distributed execution strategies across chips, hosts, and racks, including model partitioning, communication, and synchronization. Optimize end-to-end latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and hardware utilization across diverse model architectures and serving workloads. Partner with kernel, compiler, architecture, and silicon teams to co-design interfaces and remove performance bottlenecks across the stack. Enable new

About the Team OpenAI's Training team is responsible for producing the large language models that power our research, our products, and ultimately bring us closer to AGI. Achieving this goal requires combining deep research into improving our current architecture, datasets and optimization techniques, alongside long-term bets aimed at improving the efficiency and capability of future generations of models. We are responsible for integrating these techniques and producing model artifacts used by the rest of the company, and ensuring that these models are world-class in every respect. Recent examples of artifacts with major contributions from our team include GPT4-Turbo, GPT-4o and o1-mini. About the Role As a member of the architecture team, you will push the frontier of architecture development for OpenAI's flagship models, enhancing intelligence, efficiency, and adding new capabilities. Ideal candidates have a deep understanding of LLM architectures, a sophisticated understanding of model inference, and a hands-on empirical approach. A good fit for this role will be equally happy coming up with a creative breakthrough, investing in strengthening a baseline, designing an eval, debugging a thorny regression, or tracking down a bottleneck. This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Design, prototype and scale up new architectures to improve model intelligence Execute and analyze experiments autonomously and collaboratively Study, debug, and optimize both model performance and computational performance Contribute to training and inference infrastructure You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience landing contributions to major LLM training runs Can thoroughly evaluate and improve deep learning architectures in a self-directed fashion Are motivated by safely deploying LLMs in the real world Are well-versed in the state of the art tran

About the Team The Workload team is responsible for designing and running OpenAI’s LLM training and inference infrastructure that powers frontier models at massive scale. Our systems unify how researchers train and serve models, abstracting away the complexity of performance, parallelism, and execution across vast GPU/accelerator fleets. By providing this foundation, the Workload team ensures that researchers can focus on advancing model capabilities while we handle the scale, efficiency, and reliability required to bring those models to life. About the Role We are looking for an engineer to design and implement the dataset infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s next-generation training stack. You will be responsible for building standardized dataset interfaces, scaling pipelines across thousands of GPUs, and proactively testing performance bottlenecks. In this role, you will collaborate closely with the multimodal researchers, and other infra groups to ensure datasets are unified, efficient, and easy to consume. In this role, you will: Design and maintain standardized dataset APIs, including for multimodal (MM) data that cannot fit in memory. Build proactive testing and scale validation pipelines for dataset loading at GPU scale. Collaborate with teammates to integrate datasets seamlessly into training and inference pipelines, ensuring smooth adoption and a great user experience. Document and maintain dataset interfaces so they are discoverable, consistent, and easy for other teams to adopt. Establish safeguards and validation systems to ensure datasets remain reproducible and unchanged once standardized. Debug and resolve performance bottlenecks in distributed dataset loading (e.g., straggler systems slowing global training). Provide visualization and inspection tools to surface errors, bugs, or bottlenecks in datasets. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong engineering fundamentals with experience in distributed systems, data pipelines, or infrastructure.

About the Team Compute Foundations builds the software that manages OpenAI’s GPU compute infrastructure across sites, data centers, and infrastructure providers, supporting model training and inference. Our systems turn large, heterogeneous fleets of machines into dependable compute for research and products. We build Kubernetes-based control planes, controllers, services, and APIs that coordinate the lifecycle of machines and clusters. We connect global infrastructure management with the realities of bare-metal systems, giving clients consistent interfaces across differences in hardware, topology, and provider behavior. About the Role You will build distributed systems that provision, configure, and manage compute throughout its lifecycle. Your work will connect global services and Kubernetes controllers with the systems that bring machines online, update them safely, and recover them when something goes wrong. This role combines software architecture with an understanding of how machines and data centers work. You might design a lifecycle API, improve controller performance under high concurrency and provider rate limits, or trace a provisioning failure from an API through reconciliation to network boot or host configuration. You will help these systems remain reliable as the fleet expands across sites and generations of GPU hardware. We value depth in relevant systems and the ability to connect layers. You do not need to arrive as an expert in every component of the stack. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate Kubernetes-based controllers and distributed services that coordinate infrastructure across sites, isolate failures, and scale as GPU capacity grows. Define APIs and resource models that let clients request and track lifecycle operations through consistent interfaces across hardware platforms and providers. Build provisioning and configuration services that coordinate network boot, hardware management interfaces, and the deployment of firmware,

About the Team pAGI Infra team builds and operates the systems that make large-scale model training and evaluation reliable, efficient, and easy to run. Our work spans distributed training infrastructure, inference and grading platforms, compute scheduling, and research tooling. We partner closely with researchers and engineering teams to turn new research needs into dependable infrastructure, improve GPU efficiency, and shorten the path from an experiment to a validated model. About the Role We’re looking for an AI Systems Engineer to help scale the infrastructure behind our training and evaluation workflows. You’ll own projects from identifying bottlenecks and designing solutions through deployment and operation. The work combines distributed systems engineering, performance optimization, and close collaboration with researchers. You might build a shared grading service, improve resource allocation across workloads, or bring a new training stack into production — directly improving how quickly and reliably research moves forward. In this role, you will: Build and operate infrastructure for large-scale training and evaluation, improving reliability, throughput, and resource efficiency. Develop shared inference and grading platforms with automated capacity management, health monitoring, and visibility into performance. Improve compute scheduling and resource allocation to reduce idle GPU time and help workloads recover quickly from failures. Diagnose bottlenecks across training, inference, and orchestration, and work across teams to improve end-to-end performance. Build self-service tools, automated validation, and observability that help researchers launch experiments, diagnose issues, and compare results with less manual intervention. You might thrive in this role if you: Are excited about the potential of personal AGI and want to build the infrastructure that enables it. Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building or operating large-scal

The Opportunity Typography is central to how ideas are communicated. If you're passionate about beautifully created design, have deep curiosity about what AI can do, and take personal responsibility for creating products that people love; then this may be the role for you. Adobe Fonts supports millions of creatives in choosing and using typefaces across fonts.adobe.com, Express, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and more Creative Cloud platforms. Our Internal Services team provides the platform engineering and deployment backbone for all of these. We manage CI/CD, deployment approaches, the services and data layers our engineers depend on, our observability and security stance, and increasingly the agentic tools that transform how our entire organization delivers software. We're seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer to lead this exciting journey in our San Francisco location. What you'll do Own and evolve our deployment platform. Lead strategy for CI/CD, PR environments, and release safety across a mixed fleet that includes containerized services, serverless services, and static front ends. Build the foundation for AI-accelerated development. Help build our agent factory and grow our internal agentic toolkit and skill library. Ship inference applications at scale. Take greenfield services from spec to production and standardize our ML/inference footprint. Modernize our services for the AI era. Identify where an existing service is held back by its current build and lead the fix. Rethink our security posture for agentic threats. Lead how we secure autonomous agents and their tool use. Expose Adobe Fonts to the agentic ecosystem. Extend our Model Context Protocol (MCP) surface and conversational, intent-based font discovery. Work higher up the stack, too. Contribute directly to search, browse, discovery, and the customer-facing experie

About the Team The Core Network Engineering team owns the end-to-end networking stack that connects OpenAI’s compute infrastructure — spanning global WAN/edge connectivity, data-center networking, and high-performance host/xPU networking used for large-scale training and inference workloads. This team is responsible for ensuring networking is never the bottleneck to model training efficiency, cluster reliability, or fleet expansion. They design and operate the systems that provide predictable, high-throughput, low-latency connectivity across some of the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure. About the Role We’re looking for engineers to help build and operate the networking foundation behind OpenAI’s frontier AI systems. Depending on your background and area of focus, you may work across host networking, datacenter fabrics, or global WAN infrastructure. The problems span low-level systems software, distributed infrastructure, protocol readiness, observability, performance engineering, automation, and large-scale network operations. You’ll work on systems where microseconds of latency, tail performance, and network reliability directly impact model training efficiency and production serving performance. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy operating close to the hardware/software boundary and solving performance-critical infrastructure problems at massive scale. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate networking systems that support large-scale AI training and inference infrastructure Improve performance, reliability, and scalability across host networking, datacenter fabrics, and WAN systems Develop automation for provisioning, configuration management, validation, upgrades, and lifecycle management of networking infrastructure Build tooling and observability systems for network health, performance analysis, debugging, and automated remediation Optimize network performance across technologies such as RDMA, RoCE, InfiniBand, Ethernet, and high-perf

AI Systems Engineer - Codex Core Agents About The Team The Codex Core Agents team builds the agent harness that turns model capability into real-world action. We own the systems around the model: prompting and interpreting model outputs, executing actions safely in real environments, and feeding production experience back into better models and better agent behavior. This team sits close to research and works across the stack: harness, model interaction, inference, sandboxed execution, orchestration, evals, production reliability, and the performance envelope around tokens, latency, cost, capacity, and quality. The harness is open source and increasingly part of how models are trained and evaluated, making this one of the highest-leverage layers in Codex. About The Role We’re looking for engineers to build the AI systems that make Codex agents dependable in production. The ideal candidate is an agent-systems builder: hands-on across low-level systems and ML workflows, able to debug Codex behavior end to end across the harness, model behavior, inference/runtime stack, GPU fleet, and product surface. You’ll work with research, infrastructure, and product to design agent harness capabilities, run experiments and ablations across the model + system prompt + harness stack, build frameworks for assessing production agent performance, and turn messy failures into durable improvements. What You’ll Do Design and build the core agent harness and execution loop that lets Codex agents interpret model outputs, use tools, execute code, and complete long-horizon tasks safely. Build sandboxing, isolation, orchestration, state, and workflow infrastructure for agents operating in real development environments. Develop evaluation, experimentation, and debugging systems that distinguish harness issues, model behavior, inference/runtime issues, and product failures. Run ablations across prompts, model-facing interfaces, context construction, tool-use strategies, and harness behavior to

About the Team We’re hiring software engineers to make the Workload team more productive. The Workload team maintains the core components of OpenAI’s training and inference frameworks and helps execute frontier experiments. About the Role We’re looking for someone who cares about the developer experience of working in and around OpenAI’s core training and inference frameworks. In this role you will: Be responsible for optimizing the development workflows of the engineers around you Work within various Workload teams to address their specific needs, but collaborate with the centralized teams that own various aspects of development experience Optimize iteration speed, both broadly, and in particular by optimizing specific teams’ CI Improve reliability, for instance, by driving testing strategy for particular components Work through the long tail of things that it takes to build libraries and systems that will delight researchers You might thrive in this role if: You are motivated by helping people. You believe a thing that separates great teams from good teams are the players willing to do whatever work it takes, without ego. You believe in the power of developer experience. Something magical happens when people can quickly and confidently iterate on a simple codebase, but this magic is fragile and must be fought for. When you see someone trip over something, no matter how small, your first instinct is asking yourself what it would take for that to not happen again. Your second instinct is clicking merge on the PR you’ve already written to make it so. You are pragmatic. You have the ability to see the world through a perfectionist’s eyes, but are not yourself a perfectionist. You know which problems to pick and when to switch to making progress on a different problem. You like going end-to-end on things. You love co-design — that feeling when you were only able to find the right solution because you both deeply understand the users that interact with a system and the

About the Team We’re hiring software engineers to make OpenAI’s networking teams more productive. These teams build and operate the high-performance networking systems that support OpenAI’s training and inference infrastructure at frontier scale. About the Role We’re looking for someone who cares deeply about the developer experience of engineers working on complex infrastructure systems — especially around build systems, test architecture, release pipelines, and reliable development workflows. This role will be embedded with OpenAI’s networking team: making it faster, safer, and easier for engineers to build, test, validate, and ship changes across multi-server, networked, and hardware-adjacent environments. In this role you will: Improve development workflows for engineers building and operating OpenAI’s networking systems Design and improve continuous deployment, release, and validation pipelines Build and maintain test harnesses for multi-server, networked, and hardware-backed environments Improve iteration speed across C++, Python, and build-system-heavy codebases Partner with engineers to identify friction in CI, testing, debugging, and deployment workflows Drive testing and reliability strategy for infrastructure components that support large-scale training and inference workloads Work closely with centralized developer experience teams while staying deeply embedded with the networking engineers closest to the systems You might thrive in this role if: You are motivated by helping other engineers move faster and with more confidence You have experience with CI/CD, release pipelines, testing infrastructure, or build systems You are comfortable moving between C++, Python, and build systems such as CMake, Bazel, or Blaze You enjoy building test harnesses, automation, and workflow improvements for complex systems You do not need to be a networking expert, but you are excited to learn enough about the domain to make the team meaningfully more effective When you see