AI Inference Engineer — Scalable Model Serving

InvestedintheMission; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 135,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

SpaceX in Palo Alto is seeking a Software Engineer, Inference (AI Data Engineering) to design and optimize high-throughput model serving systems across SpaceX's internal AI infrastructure. You will own from distributed infrastructure to low-level optimizations, delivering reliable inference for mission-critical applications.

Aerospace experience is not required; the role emphasizes collaboration, problem solving, and impact on space exploration.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, math, or a scientific discipline or 2+ years of professional software experience in lieu of a degree.
• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining reliable, horizontally scalable distributed systems.
• 1+ years of backend or full-stack production systems experience.

Responsibilities

• Develop highly reliable, high-throughput inference systems for internal models.
• Architect scalable distributed infrastructure for model serving including load balancing and auto-scaling.
• Optimize latency and throughput under production workloads with GPU kernels and quantization.
• Build high-concurrency serving systems with strong observability.
• Own end-to-end components like request routing, SDKs, rate limiting, and scaling.
• Benchmark and accelerate inference engines (SGLang, vLLM, TensorRT-LLM).
• Develop tooling for tracing, replay, and issue resolution across the stack.

Skills

Distributed systems

Rust

C++

Python

Go

gRPC

Docker

Kubernetes

LLM inference engines

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, math, or scientific discipline

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

ClickHouse

MongoDB

SGLang

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

Triton

Job description

SpaceX in Palo Alto is seeking a Software Engineer, Inference (AI Data Engineering) to design and optimize high-throughput model serving systems across SpaceX's internal AI infrastructure. You will own from distributed infrastructure to low-level optimizations, delivering reliable inference for mission-critical applications.

Aerospace experience is not required; the role emphasizes collaboration, problem solving, and impact on space exploration.