perplexity
perplexity5mo ago
New
$220K – $485K • Offers Equity/yr

Member of Technical Staff (AI Inference Engineer)

United StatesUnited States·San Franciscofull-timelead
OtherMember Of Technical Staff
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Quick Summary

Key Responsibilities

New models support. Support transformer-based retrieval, text-generation, and multimodal models in our inference infrastructure, from weight loading,

Technical Tools
OtherMember Of Technical Staff

We build and run the inference engine behind every Perplexity query and deploy dozens of model architectures at scale with tight latency and cost budgets. Our stack is Rust, Python, CUDA, and CuTe DSL - and we need another engineer to join us.

Responsibilities

~1 min read

Examples of real work the team does:

  • →

    New models support. Support transformer-based retrieval, text-generation, and multimodal models in our inference infrastructure, from weight loading, request scheduling and KV-cache management to support in API Gateway.

  • →

    GPU kernels migration to CuTe DSL. Port our in-house CUDA kernels to NVIDIA's CuTe DSL so they run on GB200 today and are portable to Vera Rubin racks tomorrow.

  • →

    Rust-native serving runtime. Develop our internal Rust-based inference server to solve all Python pains and keep up with rapidly growing traffic.

  • →

    Performance optimisation. Profile and fix bottlenecks from network ingress through continuous batching and GPU kernel interleaving.

  • →

    Reliability and observability. Build dashboards, alerts, and automated remediation so we catch regressions before users do. Respond to and learn from production incidents.

  • Deep experience with GPU programming and performance work (CUDA, Triton, CUTLASS, or similar). Any other deep systems programming experience is a plus.

  • You understand modern LLM architectures and are able to bring them up reliably in a production environment.

  • You've built and operated production distributed systems under real load - ideally performance-critical ones.

  • Comfortable working across languages and layers: Rust for the serving runtime, Python for model code, CUDA/CuteDSL for kernels.

  • You own problems end-to-end. You can read a research paper on Monday, write a kernel on Wednesday, and debug a production incident on Friday.

  • Self-directed. You do well in fast-moving environments where the path forward isn't laid out for you.

  • ML compilers and framework internals: PyTorch internals, torch.compile, custom operators.

  • Distributed GPU communication: NCCL, NVLink, InfiniBand, RDMA libraries, model/tensor parallelism.

  • Low-precision inference: INT8/FP8/FP4 quantization, mixed-precision serving.

  • Profiling and debugging tools: Nsight Compute/Systems, CUDA-GDB, PTX/SASS analysis.

  • Container orchestration: Kubernetes, GPU scheduling, autoscaling inference workloads.

Requirements

~1 min read
  • 3+ years of professional software engineering experience with meaningful work on ML inference or high-performance systems.

  • Familiarity with at least one deep learning framework (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow).

  • Understanding of GPU architectures (memory hierarchy, warp scheduling, tensor cores).

  • Understanding of common LLM architectures and inference optimization techniques (e.g. quantization, speculative decoding, prefill-decode disaggregation).

Location & Eligibility

Where is the job
San Francisco, United States
On-site at the office
Who can apply
US

Listing Details

Posted
April 13, 2026
First seen
September 25, 2026
Last seen
September 25, 2026

Posting Health

Days active
0
Repost count
0
Trust Level
25%
Scored at
September 25, 2026

Signal breakdown

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perplexityMember of Technical Staff (AI Inference Engineer)$220K – $485K • Offers Equity