Inference Engineer, AGI

Amazon; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 144,000 - 194,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) matching

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Amazon in Seattle seeks an Inference Engineer to own components of real-time multimodal inference, from research to production, ensuring sub-second latency within cost constraints.

You will collaborate with scientists and senior engineers to optimize the inference stack, develop high-performance kernels, and shape model architectures to be servable. This role blends research and production in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Master's degree or equivalent.
• 3+ years non-internship software development experience.
• 3+ years programming in at least one language.
• 2+ years design/architecture experience.
• 1+ years optimizing neural inference.
• Solid understanding of transformers and speech/audio applications.
• Experience with latency-constrained real-time inference.
• Experience with GPU performance optimization.

Responsibilities

• Partner with researchers to help make model architectures servable and surface latency and cost implications.
• Implement and optimize parts of the inference path for large-scale multimodal models and KV-cache.
• Apply efficiency techniques across the stack and measure latency trade-offs.
• Develop high-performance kernels and integrate into production serving.
• Profile end-to-end performance using Nsight Compute/Systems and roofline analysis.
• Contribute to real-time streaming serving paths and latency budgets.
• Build offline inference systems for RL/RLHF/RLAIF and train/serve parity.

Skills

Software dev

Programming languages

Systems design

GPU optimization

Real-time inference

Ownership

Education

Master's degree or equivalent

Bachelor's degree in CS or equivalent

Tools

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

CUTLASS

Triton

FlashAttention

KV-cache

Job description

Description

We are looking for an Inference Engineer to help serve inference for real-time multimodal conversational AI. This is a full-stack inference role: you will work across the path a model takes from research to production, helping shape model architecture so it is servable, building the real-time runtime that serves it within hard latency budgets, and building the offline systems that train and reinforce it.

We are looking for an Inference Engineer to help serve inference for real-time multimodal conversational AI. This is a full-stack inference role: you will work across the path a model takes from research to production, helping shape model architecture so it is servable, building the real-time runtime that serves it within hard latency budgets, and building the offline systems that train and reinforce it. You will operate at the boundary of Science and Inference, taking frontier-scale speech and audio models and helping make them run within real-time latency budgets on production hardware. You will help co-design architectures with scientists to make them inference‑friendly, contribute to the low‑latency streaming serving path, and help build the training and reinforcement‑learning infrastructure that closes the loop. You will have the compute, data, and runway to work on problems that few teams in the world are positioned to tackle. As an Inference Engineer, you will own well‑scoped components of the inference stack, drive their technical execution with guidance, and work closely with scientists and senior engineers to help ensure our models run fast enough to feel human in real time, and at a cost that makes them viable at scale. You may go deep in one of the areas below while contributing across the others.

Key job responsibilities

Model Architecture & Inference Co-Design

• Partner with research scientists and senior engineers to help make model architectures servable, surfacing the latency, memory, and cost implications of architecture choices
• Implement and optimize parts of the inference path for large‑scale multimodal models, attention and KV‑cache mechanisms, multimodal/autoregressive decoding, and the compute primitives on the critical path
• Apply efficiency techniques across the stack, quantization (per-tensor/per‑channel/per‑group, INT8/FP8/BF16), speculative decoding, operator fusion, and paged KV‑cache, and measure their quality/latency trade‑offs
• Help develop and tune high-performance kernels for critical operations where off‑the‑shelf implementations leave performance on the table, integrating them into production serving
• Profile end‑to‑end performance with tools such as Nsight Compute/Systems and roofline analysis to help identify and eliminate bottlenecks in large‑scale inference workloads

Real‑Time & Interactive Runtime

• Contribute to the real‑time serving path for streaming multimodal conversational AI, helping meet sub‑second, streaming latency budgets under concurrent session load
• Build and tune continuous batching, scheduling, and preemption to balance throughput against per‑request latency SLAs for interactive workloads
• Customize production serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, PyTorch) for real‑time streaming generative models that fall outside standard LLM serving patterns
• Implement multi‑GPU inference (tensor parallelism, collective communication) for latency‑critical paths, and help drive cost toward parity with existing production baselines
• Help establish latency, throughput, and cost benchmarking, and publish the operational metrics that gate deployment

Offline Systems: Training, RL & Evaluation Infrastructure

• Build and scale parts of the offline inference systems behind post‑training, high‑throughput rollout generation and reward‑model serving for reinforcement learning (RL/RLHF/RLAIF)
• Help ensure train/serve consistency, that the inference path used in RL and evaluation faithfully matches production online behavior (e.g., parity across sampling and logit processing)
• Work with the evaluation team to enable offline inference that captures the quality dimensions unique to real‑time conversation, latency sensitivity, audio quality, and interaction naturalness

Basic Qualifications

• Master's degree or equivalent
• 3+ years of non‑internship professional software development experience
• 3+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
• 2+ years of experience contributing to the design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
• 1+ years of hands‑on experience optimizing inference for neural models, not just using inference frameworks, but profiling and improving them
• Solid understanding of deep learning architectures (transformers, attention mechanisms, autoregressive decoding) and their application to speech/audio or other multimodal domains
• Experience contributing to latency‑constrained, real‑time inference systems under concurrent load
• Experience with GPU performance optimization, memory hierarchy, occupancy, KV‑cache management, and the accelerator programming model
• Demonstrated ownership of a technical component, driving execution and collaborating across scientists and engineers

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building complex software systems that have been successfully delivered to customers
• Exposure to production LLM/multimodal serving internals (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT‑LLM): scheduler, batching, block manager, sampler customization
• Hands‑on experience building real‑time or streaming AI systems, speech, audio, or video, with hard latency budgets
• Experience authoring custom GPU kernels (CUTLASS, Triton, raw CUDA/PTX), fused attention (FlashAttention‑style), or quantized GEMM
• Familiarity with model‑compression and efficiency techniques, quantization, pruning, distillation, speculative decoding, long‑context optimization
• Experience building offline inference or rollout/reward‑serving infrastructure for reinforcement learning or large‑scale evaluation
• Experience with distributed training and post‑training pipelines (SFT through RL), parallelism strategies, training stability, and multi‑accelerator communication (NCCL, NVLink)
• Familiarity with multiple hardware backends (NVIDIA GPU, AWS Neuron/Trainium, edge accelerators) and how architecture choices affect inference latency, memory, and cost
• Background in speech‑to‑speech or audio generative models (codec models, autoregressive audio generation), speech recognition, or speech synthesis
• Experience shipping research to production at scale, models serving real users, not just benchmark results
• Contributions to open‑source inference/kernel projects (vLLM, CUTLASS, FlashAttention, TensorRT‑LLM, Triton, or similar)

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, CA, Sunnyvale - 165,200.00 - 223,600.00 USD annually
USA, MA, Boston - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually

Company

Amazon.com Services LLC