Senior Software Engineer / Architect

About Affine Affine is building an incentivized RL environment that pays miners for incremental improvements on tasks like program synthesis and coding. Operating on Bittensor s Subnet 120, we ve created a sybil-proof, decoy-proof, copy-proof, and overfitting-proof mechanism that rewards genuine model improvements. Our vision is to commoditize reasoning—the highest form of intelligence—by directing and aggregating the work of a large, non-permissioned group on RL tasks to break the intelligence sound barrier. Overview Affine s incentivized RL environment requires high-performance, fault-tolerant systems that can scale with global participation. As a Senior Software Engineer / Architect, you ll design and build the core infrastructure powering distributed evaluation, model versioning, real-time leaderboards, and validation mechanisms across Affine, Bittensor s subnet-120. This role emphasizes systems architecture at scale: distributed inference pipelines, Pareto frontier computation, caching and load-balancing strategies, and resilient validation frameworks. You ll take the protocols and research outputs from our ML and incentive teams and engineer them into production-grade, decentralized infrastructure capable of handling 1,000+ model submissions per day. We re seeking someone who thrives on complex engineering challenges—from scaling throughput and latency-sensitive evaluation, to building monitoring systems that track the health of a live, competitive network. Your work ensures Affine s infrastructure can handle the demands of global participation while remaining secure, fair, and performant. Responsibilities• Architect and implement distributed systems for model evaluation, inference pipelines, and versioning. • Design high-availability infrastructure for real-time leaderboards and validator mechanisms. • Develop caching, load balancing, and failure recovery strategies to ensure performance and resilience. • Translate research protocols into production-grade systems, collaborating closely with ML and incentive design teams. • Build monitoring and observability tools to track system health, throughput, and fairness across the subnet. • Contribute to architectural decisions for decentralized systems supporting large-scale participation. Qualifications• Strong experience in systems engineering, distributed/decentralized systems, and scalable networking. • Proficiency in Python; exposure to Rust a strong plus, particularly for protocol-level engineering. • Background in DevOps practices, including containerization, orchestration, and CI/CD pipelines. • Demonstrated ability to design and optimize high-performance, fault-tolerant infrastructure. • Experience with latency-sensitive and throughput-intensive systems at scale. • Familiarity with monitoring, logging, and observability frameworks for live distributed environments.