Senior/Staff AI Engineer

Data Direct Networks • Raleigh, NC

2d • $123,000 - $266,100

About The Position

Build the AI infrastructure layer that determines whether modern models actually work in production. Most AI roles sit at the application layer. This one does not. At DDN, we’re hiring an AI Engineer to work on the hard part of AI: the systems, storage, and performance infrastructure behind real-world model serving and inference. This is the role for engineers who care about what happens under load, at scale, and in production — not just in demos. If your background sits at the intersection of AI infrastructure, distributed systems, and performance engineering, this is the kind of role where your depth will matter.

Requirements

• An engineer who has spent meaningful time building or optimizing production AI systems, not just experimenting with models
• Someone who understands how inference performance is shaped by the interaction between compute, memory, storage, and serving architecture
• Deep hands-on experience working close to the systems layer — for example, improving how workloads run across GPU and CPU resources, reducing bottlenecks, or tuning infrastructure for better throughput and latency
• Evidence of real ownership in areas like model serving, retrieval, caching, storage, or distributed performance, rather than purely application-layer AI work
• The ability to move comfortably between architecture decisions and hands-on implementation, especially in environments where efficiency and scale matter
• A background that suggests you can operate in technically demanding environments, whether that comes from AI infrastructure, high-performance systems, storage platforms, or adjacent distributed systems work

Nice To Haves

• PhD preferred, but far less important than having built serious systems in the real world

Responsibilities

• Build and optimize LLM serving and inference systems for production environments
• Improve performance across GPU and CPU pathways
• Work on KV cache, memory, storage, and throughput bottlenecks
• Design and scale systems that support RAG and retrieval-heavy AI workloads
• Contribute to infrastructure where storage architecture and systems efficiency materially affect AI performance
• Solve engineering problems at the intersection of AI, high-performance systems, and distributed infrastructure

Benefits

• This is a chance to work on the infrastructure that determines whether modern AI systems are fast, scalable, efficient, and commercially viable.
• If you want to work on the real mechanics of AI performance — serving, retrieval, compute efficiency, memory behavior, storage architecture, and inference at scale — this is where that work happens.
• DDN has deep credibility in high-performance infrastructure, and this role sits in a part of the market where that foundation matters.
• If you want to build the systems serious AI depends on — rather than the layer that merely sits on top of it — this is a rare opportunity to do exactly that.
• Apply if you want to build the infrastructure behind production AI — not just consume it.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree