AI Inference Tools Engineer

Modular•United States,

3d•$167,000 - $242,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At Modular, we are building a next-generation AI platform to power modern applications and facilitate access to cutting-edge hardware. The MAX framework is our developer-facing layer, defining the APIs developers use to express models, integrate custom kernels, orchestrate execution, iterate on quality, and ship systems into production. As an engineer on the MAX Tools team, you will build the developer tooling for Modular's AI inference stack to make engineers who build and deploy AI models more productive. You will be working on tools to help people create, debug, and optimize models and kernels. Modular’s vertically integrated ML serving stack allows you to solve a uniquely diverse set of problems and gives you especially broad scope for creating solutions. A growing part of our work is agent-native tooling: tools designed so that AI agents can profile, triage, and debug issues under engineer guidance.

Requirements

Passion for creating exceptional developer experiences and an understanding of what makes great tools feel effortless.
Experience designing, building, and shipping developer tools, developer infrastructure, or observability systems that other engineers rely on.
Fluency in one or more systems/performance languages (C++, Rust, Go) and one or more user-facing languages (Python; familiarity with Mojo is a plus).
Experience measuring software performance via profiling, tracing, or benchmarking, and the systems knowledge to analyze those results.
Clear written communication and the ability to work independently in a distributed team.
A user-focused mindset: you seek out the people who use your tools, learn their workflows, and prioritize what makes them more productive.

Nice To Haves

Experience with GPU performance tooling (Nsight Systems/Compute, rocprof, Perfetto, or similar) or GPU programming (CUDA, ROCm).
Knowledge of basic AI implementation and modeling techniques and familiarity with AI frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
Experience building tooling for AI agents (e.g. agent skills, MCP).

Responsibilities

Enhance the MAX developer experience by creating tools that can be part of traditional and agentic workflows, by surfacing data through the entire AI stack, and by supporting a widening list of heterogeneous hardware platforms.
Design, build, and maintain key technologies that support the MAX framework, such as profiling and tracing tools, debuggers and associated tools to check correctness, and metrics and dashboards to monitor the performance and health of MAX deployments.
Create agent-native tooling: tools that can be used by humans and agents alike, and the agentic workflows that go around them. Write agents to bring up models, to triage issues with running systems, and to profile and optimize based on real workloads.
Connect MAX tools through the entire stack: by strengthening the tooling interfaces between MAX, Mojo, and the driver APIs they run on; and by integrating tool use cleanly with the orchestration layers above.
Participate in design discussions and code reviews to uphold high engineering standards.
Work directly with the kernel, model, and serving engineers who use your tools every day, and turn their recurring pain points into better tools.