About Us: AI needs a new infrastructure layer. We're building it at Modal. Every era of computing brought new workloads that previous infrastructure couldn't support: mainframes, databases, and the cloud. Each time, the company that rebuilt the layer underneath defined the decade. AI is no different, except it touches everything instead of one slice, and the window to build the layer underneath it is open right now. Our customers include category-defining companies like Lovable , Ramp , Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno. They rely on Modal for instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage, so it's simple to serve low-latency inference, fine-tune models, and access production-ready sandboxes at scale. We recently raised a $355M Series C at a $4.65B valuation, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures. We've crossed $300M+ ARR and grown fivefold since September. Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g., Seaborn , Luig i ), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience. The Role: Modal builds the infrastructure that lets engineers run AI workloads without the usual pain. To do this well, we need exceptional people – and that’s where you come in. As the first dedicated GTM recruiter on our Talent team, you’ll own sales, GTM, and other G&A searches end-to-end. You’ll work closely with our Head of Talent, founders, and GTM leads to shape how we hire and help bring in the people who will define what Modal becomes. What you’ll do: Drive full-cycle recruiting for key hires across GTM and G&A functions (sourcing, pitching, guiding interviews, and closing candidates) Partner with GTM leaders to understand the real work and calibrate on what great looks like Help set our hiring bar and how we evaluate talent Execute creative top-of-funnel strategies that resonate with a strong community of experienced GTM talent Deliver a fast, respectful, h
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Inference Technical Lead in San Francisco
268 active opportunities · Updated October 2026
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Explore current inference technical lead jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
AI needs a new infrastructure layer. We're building it at Modal. Every era of computing brought new workloads that previous infrastructure couldn't support: mainframes, databases, and the cloud. Each time, the company that rebuilt the layer underneath defined the decade. AI is no different, except it touches everything instead of one slice, and the window to build the layer underneath it is open right now. Our customers include category-defining companies like Lovable , Ramp , Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno. They rely on Modal for instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage, so it's simple to serve low-latency inference, fine-tune models, and access production-ready sandboxes at scale. We recently raised a $355M Series C at a $4.65B valuation, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures. We've crossed $300M+ ARR and grown fivefold since September. Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g., Seaborn , Luig i ), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience. About the Role We're seeking a Revenue Operations Manager with a strong track record, a builder's mindset, and a bias for action to join our in-person team in New York or SF. This is a high-impact, hands-on role. You'll own the entire revenue operations function, from top-of-funnel lead routing through deal close and commission administration. You'll work closely with our Head of Finance & People Ops and sales leadership to build the systems, dashboards, and processes that scale our go-to-market motion. What You'll Do: Own the lead routing process from inbound and partnering with marketing to ensure proper attribution Run effective territory management & strategy for Geo based decisioning Support & strategise every aspect of revenue operations in your territory Own the strategy for capacity forecasting, inputs, throughputs & outputs being the conduit back to finance in
What you’ll do Partner with medical image reconstruction scientists / engineers to build ML components that improve reconstruction quality, speed, robustness, or quantitative accuracy. Define training/evaluation pipelines, datasets, and metrics that map to user needs and design requirements. Productionize models: inference performance, reproducibility, monitoring for drift/regressions, and safe fallbacks. Collaborate on hybrid algorithms, incorporating physics and learned priors, denoisers, learned regularizers, and quality estimation. Help build tooling for rapid experimentation as well as rigorous verification of algorithm changes. What we’re looking for Strong applied ML experience plus comfort with signal processing / imaging or adjacent domains. Ability to move fluidly between research prototypes and production-quality systems. Strong evaluation discipline: metrics, ablations, data leakage avoidance, and reproducibility. A demonstrated track record of applying ML to physics-based or inverse problems (i.e., shipped projects, a portfolio, or publications.) Useful experience ML for imaging/inverse problems (or adjacent) with strong evaluation discipline and comfort with GPU performance constraints. Pragmatic production mindset: reproducible training/inference, regression testing, and safe deployment in high-stakes contexts. A background in computational physics or scientific computing. Leverage ML-based methods such as PiNNs and Neural Operators to solve partial differential equations arising in ultrasound simulation and imaging. Experience in Agentic-SciML is a plus. Hands-on experience with data curation for ML: building datasets from messy, real-world sources, defining ground truth, and managing labeling or simulation pipelines. Background in data assimilation: combining observations with physics-based models (Kalman filtering, variational methods, ensemble approaches, or learned variants).
About the Team OpenAI’s Infrastructure Operations team is responsible for the availability, reliability, and operational excellence of one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure networks. The team owns day-to-day operations of production AI networks across Industrial Compute's data centers, working with colocation providers, deployment teams, and hardware vendors to deliver highly available GPU infrastructure for AI training and inference workloads. About the Role We are seeking an Infrastructure Operations Engineer to operate and improve the large-scale Ethernet fabrics that support GPU clusters, storage systems, and management infrastructure. This role combines hands-on production operations with automation, observability, and incident response across a global AI network. The ideal candidate has experience operating high-availability data center, cloud, AI, or HPC networks and can move comfortably from physical-layer troubleshooting to routing and fabric behavior, change execution, and root-cause analysis. You will partner closely with network architecture, systems engineering, GPU engineering, storage engineering, security, deployment, site operations, service providers, colocation partners, and hardware vendors to raise reliability and reduce operational toil. Key Responsibilities Own the operational health, availability, and reliability of production AI network infrastructure across Industrial Compute's data centers. Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve network incidents while meeting service-level objectives (SLOs), reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), and minimizing Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). Operate and maintain large-scale Ethernet fabrics supporting GPU compute, storage, and management networks. Execute production network changes, maintenance windows, and capacity expansions with minimal customer impact. Manage the hardware lifecycle, including switch and optics replacements, RMA coordination, software upgrades, and preventive maintenance. Support new A
About the team The Applied team safely brings OpenAI's technology to the world. We released ChatGPT; Plugins; DALL·E; and the APIs for GPT-5, embeddings, and fine-tuning. We also operate inference infrastructure at scale. There's a lot more on the immediate horizon. Our customers build fast-growing businesses around our APIs, which power product features that were never before possible. ChatGPT is a prime example of what is currently possible. We simultaneously ensure that our powerful tools are used responsibly. Safe deployment is more important to us than unfettered growth. The Fraud Engineering team works within our Applied Engineering organization identifying and responding to fraudsters on our platform. We are looking for a software engineer with anti fraud & abuse experience to help architect and build our next-generation anti-fraud systems. About the role The Scaled Abuse team protects OpenAI’s products and customers by detecting, preventing, and responding to fraudulent and abusive behavior at scale. We build and operate the backend and data systems that power real-time detection, investigation workflows, and enforcement — balancing strong protections with a great user experience as the platform grows. Our work sits at the intersection of engineering and abuse expertise: we partner closely with Trust & Safety, Security, and Product to understand emerging attack patterns, translate messy signals into clear system behavior, and continuously harden our defenses. The problems are dynamic and ambiguous by default, so we value engineers who can quickly dive into an unfamiliar codebase, develop strong intuition about how it works end-to-end, and propose pragmatic improvements that make the entire stack more resilient. In this role, you will: Design and build systems for fraud detection and remediation while balancing fraud loss, cost of implementation, and customer experience Work closely with finance, security, product, research, and trust & safety ope
About the Team The Private Computing team works across product, engineering, security, and safety to build advanced privacy products and infrastructure at OpenAI. Our mission is to provide world-class security features to users so their private data remains private, even from OpenAI. We use technologies like confidential computing, trusted execution environments, and end-to-end encryption to ship product features across ChatGPT, the API, and our future consumer devices. About the Role We’re looking for software engineers to design, build, and scale novel privacy features and infrastructure across ChatGPT, API, and future consumer devices. In this role, you will: Ship fast while balancing difficult trade-offs in complex domains Build core abstractions for trusted execution environments and end-to-end-encryption Build product features for private inference and storage across ChatGPT, API, and future consumer devices Update build systems to increase trust and verifiability Integrate with safety and integrity infrastructure Operate systems at scale with high reliability, including an on-call rotation Collaborate with a diverse set of cross-functional teams across product, engineering, security, safety, policy, and legal You might thrive in this role if you: Care deeply about user privacy and security Have 5+ years of experience in professional software engineering Have experience building and scaling confidential computing or encryption technologies in production environments Have experience with Kubernetes and cloud orchestration systems Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable, secure systems Can collaborate well and drive alignment in the face of difficult trade-offs Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change Workplace & Location This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We follow a hybrid model with 4 days a week in the office and offer relocation assistance to new employees. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicat
About the Team The Hardware Health and Observability team owns the end-to-end health lifecycle of OpenAI’s global compute fleet. Our mission is to maximize healthy, usable compute across accelerator vendors, generations, cloud providers, and regions through reliable health signals, automated remediation, and scalable operational tooling. We build the systems that observe, detect, remediate, and verify hardware issues across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure, enabling frontier model training and inference workloads to run reliably at hyperscale. We are the last line of defense for the success of OAI’s production and research workloads. About the Role On the Hardware Health and Observability team, you’ll build critical infrastructure that keeps OpenAI’s largest compute clusters healthy and operational at scale. Even small numbers of unhealthy systems can impact large-scale training and inference workloads. This team focuses on minimizing downtime, improving fleet efficiency, and ensuring compute resources remain continuously available to researchers and product teams. Engineers on this team own problems end-to-end, from defining health signals and debugging failures to building automated remediation systems that operate across millions of GPUs globally. In this role, you will: Define and maintain health signals across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure. Build and evolve health checks that detect, remediate, and verify failures at scale. Ensure critical health checks execute with minimal latency to maximize workload uptime. Investigate hardware failures and system-level issues across large-scale compute environments. Own node lifecycle workflows including drain, quarantine, repair, RMA, and return-to-service processes. Build automation and tooling that enables global cluster management with minimal manual intervention. Partner with workload, reliability, and provider teams to integrate health signals into training and inference system
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 On the Accelerators team, you will help OpenAI evaluate and bring up new compute platforms that can support large-scale AI training and inference. Your work will range from prototyping system software on new accelerators to enabling performance optimizations across our AI workloads. You’ll work across the stack, collaborating with both hardware and software aspects - working on kernels, sharding strategies, scaling across distributed systems, and performance modeling. You'll help adapt OpenAI's software stack to non-traditional hardware and drive efficiency improvements in core AI workloads. This is not a compiler-focused role, rather bridging ML algorithms with system performance - especially at scale. In this role, you will: Prototype and enable OpenAI's AI software stack on new, exploratory accelerator platforms. Optimize large-scale model performance (LLMs, recommender systems, distributed AI workloads) for diverse hardware environments. Develop kernels, sharding mechanisms, and system scaling strategies tailored to emerging accelerators. Collaborate on optimizations at the model code level (e.g. PyTorch) and below to enhance performance on non-traditional hardware. Perform system-level performance modeling, debug bottlenecks, and drive end-to-end optimization. Work with hardware teams and vendors to evaluate alternatives to existing platforms and adapt the software stack to their architectures. Contribute to runtime improvements, compute/communication over
About OpenAI OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our mission requires building not only world-class AI models, but also the infrastructure that enables those models to be deployed reliably, efficiently, and at global scale. As demand for AI continues to grow, we are expanding the ways OpenAI can bring high-performance inference capacity online across a diverse hardware ecosystem. About the Team The GPT Infrastructure team builds software that turns advanced inference and optimization research into production products. One focus is enabling strategic infrastructure partners and accelerator vendors to qualify and onboard new compute without a bespoke porting and optimization effort for every hardware platform. We build the control planes, APIs, secure partner-side execution environments, evaluation systems, artifact pipelines, and operational tooling that make these workflows repeatable and trustworthy. The work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, AI inference, compilers and runtimes, performance engineering, security, and external partnerships. About the Role We are seeking an experienced systems generalist who can work comfortably across the stack to help build an automated inference optimization platform. Given a workload, target hardware profile, compiler and runtime context, and a trusted verifier, the system runs durable optimization campaigns that generate, compile, execute, grade, and improve candidate kernels, runtime configurations, and serving-stack changes. You will design both the OpenAI-hosted control plane and the partner-side software that evaluates candidates on real accelerator hardware. The product must keep long-running workflows reliable, make performance results reproducible, and maintain clear trust boundaries around sensitive model and hardware information. This is a deeply cross-stack role, combining strong software engineering fundamentals with systems thinking and
About the Team The Applied team at OpenAI safely brings cutting-edge technology to the world. We have released widely used products such as ChatGPT, Sora, and the OpenAI API, powering models including GPT-5 and a growing set of multimodal capabilities across text, image, audio, and video. Our team also manages large-scale inference and platform infrastructure that supports these experiences at global scale. With much more on the horizon, our impact continues to grow. Our customers build fast-growing businesses using our APIs, unlocking product capabilities that were previously unimaginable. ChatGPT and Sora exemplify the breadth of what’s now possible across text, image, audio, and video experiences. As these capabilities expand, we prioritize the responsible use of our technology, emphasizing safe and thoughtful deployment over unchecked growth. Within Applied Engineering, the Ads Monetization team in Financial Engineering builds the core systems dealing with all the money flows for ChatGPT Ads. These systems are a combination of low-latency, high scale, high reliability, while being built in a financially correct, accurate, auditable and explainable way. This role sits at the intersection of ads delivery, data engineering, and financial systems. In this role, you will: Architect and build the core monetization systems for ChatGPT Ads. Build and operate the core services and pipelines that power ads monetization end-to-end, from event capture and validation through aggregation, pricing, metering, and ultimately producing billable outputs. Define and implement the source of truth for ads monetization data, including schemas, data models, and invariants that ensure outputs are consistent, explainable, and auditable. Own correctness and reconciliation: align production outputs with downstream invoicing/finance requirements, build controls/monitors, and close gaps through investigations and backfills. Develop across the stack to create comprehensive billing integration
About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system-level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team is responsible for building the next generation of AI-native silicon while working closely with software and research partners to co-design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering production-grade silicon for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team also creates custom design tools and methodologies that accelerate innovation and enable hardware optimized specifically for AI. About the Role As an Engineer on our hardware optimization and co-design team, you will co-design future hardware from different vendors for programmability and performance. You will work with our kernel, compiler and machine learning engineers to understand their unique needs related to ML techniques, algorithms, numerical approximations, programming expressivity, and compiler optimizations. You will evangelize these constraints with various vendors to develop and influence future hardware architectures towards efficient training and inference on our models. If you are excited about efficiently distributing a large language model across devices, dealing with and optimizing system-wide/rack-wide networking bottlenecks and eventually tailoring the compute pipe and memory hierarchy of the hardware platform, simulating workloads at different abstractions and working closely with our partners, this is the perfect opportunity! This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. Key Responsibilities Co-design future hardware for programmability and performance with our hardware vendors Assist hardware vendors in developing optimal kernels and add support for it in our compiler Develop performance estimates for critical kernels for different hardware configurations and drive decisions on compute core and memory h
About the Team The Scaling team is responsible for the architectural and engineering backbone of OpenAI’s infrastructure. We design and deliver advanced systems that support the deployment and operation of cutting-edge AI models. Our work spans system software, networking, platform architecture, fleet-level monitoring, and performance optimization. About the Role We’re hiring an SW Engineer to enable production workloads and end-to-end testing on new platforms. This role will include creating new test harnesses and platform stress benchmarks, porting existing inference and training workloads to new, sometimes early-access, systems/hardware, analyzing performance and bottlenecks, and characterizing the end-to-end behavior of new systems (compute, comms, storage, control plane, and failure modes). Key Responsibilities Port and validate key inference and training workloads on new platforms/SKUs as they arrive; drive correctness, performance, and stability to an internal readiness bar. Build a suite of benchmarks and stress tests that capture real E2E behavior of our workloads by exercising all aspects of a system, including CPU, GPU, memory subsystem, frontend, scale-up, and scale-out networking (including WAN traffic, NVlink and RDMA collectives), storage, thermals, and any other relevant parts. Deep-dive performance on distributed training/inference: Collective performance and tuning (across NCCL/RCCL and internal libraries) Overlap of compute/communication, kernel-level bottlenecks, memory bandwidth and scheduling effects Create repeatable test harnesses that run in CI / lab environments and produce actionable outputs (pass/fail, performance score, regression detection). Partner with systems + fleet bring-up engineers to ensure the platform is not only stable and performant, but also operationally usable and scalable (containerization, K8s integration, telemetry hooks, failure triage loops). Work cross-functionally with vendors and internal stakeholders by producing
About the Team OpenAI’s Industrial Compute team is responsible for building and scaling large-scale compute capacity across first-party data centers, strategic partners, and industrial infrastructure environments. We focus on converting power, land, hardware, and operational execution into reliable compute capacity that can support frontier AI training and inference workloads. This team operates at the intersection of infrastructure delivery, hardware systems, utilities, supply chain, and capacity strategy—ensuring OpenAI can scale compute faster than traditional models allow. About the Role We are seeking a Tokens-as-a-Service (TaaS) Lead to drive the end-to-end conversion of industrial-scale infrastructure investments into usable token capacity for OpenAI workloads. In this role, you will own execution across complex compute programs where raw infrastructure capacity must be transformed into operational GPU throughput. You will coordinate across data center delivery, power, networking, hardware deployment, workload enablement, finance, and external partners to ensure capacity becomes productive tokens as quickly and efficiently as possible. This role is ideal for someone who can bridge physical infrastructure delivery with compute utilization outcomes. Success requires strong systems thinking, elite program leadership, and the ability to drive accountability across internal teams and strategic partners. In this role, you will Lead Tokens-as-a-Service programs across industrial compute environments, including first-party and partner-owned capacity. Convert delivered power, space, and hardware capacity into production-ready token throughput. Build integrated execution plans spanning construction, power energization, rack deployment, networking, cluster readiness, and workload onboarding. Partner with infrastructure engineering, hardware, networking, finance, supply chain, and operations teams. Drive external providers, EPCs, OEMs, utilities, and strategic partners t
Who We Are Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together . We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. About the Role: Notion has been at the cutting edge of AI since before ChatGPT launched. The job of the Model Capabilities team is to keep us there. We own the model layer of Notion AI: integrating frontier models as they ship, keeping inference reliable and economical at scale, and building new capabilities that other teams take advantage of. This role can be based in either San Francisco or New York City. We work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays (our Anchor Days) because we do our best thinking and building together in person. We’re looking for someone who’s excited to work alongside the team during those days. What You'll Achieve: Bring new frontier models into production quickly, making them available for our users and our engineers. Make inference reliable: better error categorization, self-healing retries, and cross-provider failover. Own observability for the model layer, driving down both time to detection and time to fix. Build new model-level capabilities and help product teams adopt them. Act as connective tissue across Notion's AI teams: find the gaps, unblock people, and make sure fixes land with the r
About Pinterest: Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product. Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible. At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI. Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here . Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love. As a Pinterest employee, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. As a Principal Engineer on the AI Platform team, you'll help architect the infrastructure that powers both Generative AI and Recommender Systems across Pinterest's entire product suite. Our team builds the end-to-end engines for petabyte-scale data orchestration, model training and fine-tuning, and high-performance inference, ensuring our models scale seamlessly to hundreds of millions of inferences per second in service of over 600 million monthly active users.
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