Applied AI Inference Engineer

Crusoe•Sunnyvale, CA

1d•$250,000 - $300,000

About The Position

This role focuses on optimizing large language models (LLMs) for production environments, making them faster, cheaper, and more reliable. The engineer will own the end-to-end inference stack, employing modern optimization techniques and delving into serving code when necessary. This is a hands-on engineering position involving core systems and performance work on demanding models. The role is applied, with optimizations directly impacting customer deployments. It requires tailoring deployments to customer needs, managing workloads from proof of concept to production, and ensuring performance gains are realized. The position involves coding, profiling, low-level optimization, and a customer-facing aspect, including product and technical solutions work.

Requirements

A Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.
Hands-on experience shipping code in production with one or more general-purpose languages, such as Python or C++, with a strong preference for Python.
Familiarity with methods for optimizing LLMs for high throughput / low latency inference.
Comfort with modern LLM serving frameworks such as vLLM or SGLang, and with profiling and analyzing performance down to the kernel level.
A firm grasp of how GPUs are built and how they behave.
Clear interest and hands-on experience with large language models.
A working knowledge of AI/ML pipelines and the full path of developing and deploying ML models.
Strong communication skills, particularly when explaining hard technical topics to customers and teammates.

Nice To Haves

A track record of making software systems run faster, especially for large language models.
Experience with CUDA or comparable technologies.
A strong command of software engineering fundamentals, with a record of building and shipping AI/ML inference systems.
Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
Prior work building or tuning AI/ML projects, particularly in a customer-facing setting.

Responsibilities

Bring current inference techniques into production and refine them.
Design and optimize serving architectures, including prefill and decode disaggregation, request routing, and related approaches.
Work down into the serving stack, from frameworks like vLLM and SGLang to the CUDA kernels underneath, profiling and running in-depth analysis to find and fix performance problems.
Adapt and scale optimization methods across many kinds of ML models, with an emphasis on large language models.
Profile and tune deployments against clear targets for latency, throughput, and cost, and keep them dependable under real traffic.
Tailor deployments to each customer's models and constraints, partnering with their engineering teams to move a workload from an early proof of concept through to a live, well-monitored production service.
Build and support the software and product features around the inference stack in a production setting, using one or more general-purpose languages, with Python preferred given how central it is to ML work.
Experiment quickly: take fuzzy goals, shape them into clear specs and focused proofs of concept, run fast experiments to find what works, and ship well-tested results without delay.
Own delivery end to end, from the first experiment through to the optimization running in production, keeping the underlying performance goals, clear specs, and follow-through front of mind, and drafting features and product requirement documents together with other engineering and product teams.
Work through ambiguity and make sound calls on tradeoffs and tooling, steering away from complexity that is not needed.
Take real pride and ownership in your work, hold yourself accountable, and look for the same from the people around you.