Software Engineer - Inference Performance

The role

You will work across the stack from the inference engine and runtime through scheduling, serving, and routing. You will implement inference techniques and optimize performance to improve tokens per GPU-hour and reduce costs.

What you will do

• Implement and productionize cutting-edge inference techniques including quantization, speculative decoding, and custom scheduling.
• Profile and optimize inference end to end from kernel launch overhead to request scheduling.
• Improve tokens per GPU-hour and raise utilization to turn performance into cost savings.
• Bring up and tune new model architectures on new hardware.
• Build benchmarking frameworks to measure real-world performance.
• Contribute upstream to open-source inference engines.
• Partner with model, infrastructure, and customer-facing teams.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field.
• Experience with one or more general-purpose programming languages, such as Python or C++.
• Familiarity with LLM optimization techniques (e.g., quantization, speculative decoding, continuous batching).
• Strong familiarity with ML libraries, especially PyTorch, TensorRT, or TensorRT-LLM.
• Demonstrated interest and experience in LLMs.
• Deep understanding of GPU architecture.

Nice to have

• Proficiency in enhancing the performance of software systems, particularly in the context of large language models (LLMs)
• Contributed to vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, or another inference engine.
• Worked on large-scale distributed serving: autoscaling, load balancing, multi-region or multi-cloud capacity.
• Written or optimized GPU kernels (CUDA, Triton, CUTLASS, or similar)
• Worked on quantization (FP8/FP4, AWQ, GPTQ) or speculative decoding in production.
• Deep understanding of software engineering principles and a proven track record of developing and deploying AI/ML inference solutions.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents (U.S. only)
• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break
• Paid parental leave
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
• Company-facilitated 401(k) (U.S. only)
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups

About the company

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for AI companies by uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling. The company recently raised a $1.5B Series F.