Member of Technical Staff, Inference

Inferact•San Francisco, CA

7d•$200,000 - $400,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Inferact's mission is to grow vLLM as the world's AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster. Founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, we sit at the intersection of models and hardware—a position that took years to build. We're looking for an inference runtime engineer to push the boundaries of what's possible in LLM and diffusion model serving. Models grow larger. Architectures shift: mixture-of-experts, multimodal, agentic. Every breakthrough demands innovations on the inference engine itself. You'll work at the core of vLLM, optimizing how models execute across diverse hardware and architectures. Your work will directly impact how the world runs AI inference.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar.
Deep understanding of transformer architectures and their variants.
Strong programming skills in Python with experience in PyTorch internals.
Experience with LLM inference systems (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang, TGI).
Ability to read and implement model architectures and inference techniques from research papers.
Demonstrate the ability to contribute performant and maintainable code and debug in complex ML codebases.

Nice To Haves

Deep understanding of KV-cache memory management, prefix caching, and hybrid model serving.
Familiarity with RL frameworks and algorithms for LLMs.
Experience with multimodal inference (audio/image/video/text).
Contributions to open-source ML or system infrastructure projects.
Implemented core features in vLLM or other inference engine projects.
Contributed to vLLM integrations (verl, OpenRLHF, Unsloth, LlamaFactory, etc).
Written widely-shared technical blogs or side projects on vLLM or LLM inference.

Responsibilities

Work at the core of vLLM, optimizing how models execute across diverse hardware and architectures.
Push the boundaries of what's possible in LLM and diffusion model serving.
Innovate on the inference engine to support evolving model architectures and demands.
Contribute performant and maintainable code and debug in complex ML codebases.