INFERENCE ENGINEER

MakerMaker; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

MakerMaker in San Francisco is seeking a Senior ML systems engineer to build and operate production inference systems for large models. You will own performance, profiling, and optimizations to ensure high throughput and low latency in production.

You will collaborate with researchers to implement inference optimizations, design observability, and run capacity planning across varied workloads. This role requires ownership, autonomy, and strong written communication.

Qualifications

• Senior ML systems engineer with 3+ years building production-grade, large-scale serving infrastructure.
• Strong distributed systems experience; on-call for systems that matter.
• Performance profiling and optimization fluency: you read flame graphs and are analytical.

Responsibilities

• Build, operate, and harden production inference systems serving large models at high throughput.
• Own the performance characteristics of those systems end-to-end: throughput, latency, cost-per-token, reliability under load.
• Profile real workloads to identify bottlenecks; ship fixes that move the metric you set out to improve.
• Implement and integrate inference optimizations from the research team (quantization, custom kernels, scheduling improvements, memory management) into production.
• Design observability into the inference layer: metrics, tracing, alerting that surface regressions before users notice them.
• Run capacity planning, autoscaling, and load testing for varied workload shapes (batch, online, mixed, agentic).
• Diagnose and resolve production incidents; write postmortems that turn bugs into systemic fixes.

Skills

Senior ML systems engineer

Distributed systems

Performance profiling

GPU-accelerated inference

Python (Fluent); system-level coding

Production infrastructure shipping

Clear written communication

Tools

CUDA

ROCm

Triton

Job description

ABOUT THE COMPANY

We’re building autonomous research agents for recursive self-improvement (multi-agent systems that propose, run, and analyze machine learning experiments). We’re a small team based in San Francisco, on-site

ABOUT THE ROLE

You build and operate the inference systems that serve our models in production. The work spans serving infrastructure, runtime optimization, and the long tail of production infrastructure that come with running real workloads.

This is an engineering role, not a research role. You’ll measure, profile, debug, and ship. You’ll work alongside researchers, but your job is to make their work fast and reliable in production. Real ownership, real autonomy.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Build, operate, and harden production inference systems serving large models at high throughput




• Own the performance characteristics of those systems end-to-end: throughput, latency, cost-per-token, reliability under load




• Profile real workloads to identify bottlenecks; ship fixes that move the metric you set out to improve




• Implement and integrate inference optimizations from the research team (quantization, custom kernels, scheduling improvements, memory management) into production




• Design observability into the inference layer: metrics, tracing, alerting that surface regressions before users notice them




• Run capacity planning, autoscaling, and load testing for varied workload shapes (batch, online, mixed, agentic)




• Diagnose and resolve production incidents; write postmortems that turn bugs into systemic fixes

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• Senior ML systems engineer with 3+ years building production-grade, large-scale serving infrastructure




• Strong distributed systems experience ; you’ve been on-call for systems that matter




• Performance profiling and optimization fluency: you read flame graphs, you are analytical and measured before you change




• Experience with GPU-accelerated inference at scale (multi-GPU, multi-node, batched and streaming workloads), preferably experience with AMD GPUs




• Fluent Python; comfortable reading and writing systems-level code in at least one of the following languages: C++,CUDA, ROCm or Triton




• Track record of shipping production infrastructure, preferably surfaces serving millions of requests across diverse workloads




• Good written communication; you can write a runbook that someone else can follow at 3am

NICE TO HAVE

• Open-source contributions to inference / serving frameworks




• Experience with mixed cloud and on-premises deployments




• Familiarity with hardware-aware optimization (memory hierarchy, NCCL/RDMA, NUMA)




• Background in compilers, runtimes, or accelerator software stacks




• THIS ROLE IS PROBABLY NOT FOR YOU IF




• You’re primarily a researcher, the work here is building, not exploring




• You want to focus narrowly on one component; this role spans the stack




• Production responsibility (incidents, on-call, ownership of running systems) isn’t appealing