Inference Systems Engineer - High-Performance AI

SpaceXAI; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 440,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical coverage

Vision coverage

Dental coverage

401(k) retirement plan

Job summary

SpaceXAI is building a high-performance inference platform used by Grok at scale. As a Member of Technical Staff - Inference, you will design and optimize distributed infrastructure for model serving, including global KV caching, batching, and auto-scaling, with deep GPU kernel work and code generation.

You will own everything from distributed infrastructure to low-level optimizations, shaping how fast and reliably users interact with Grok across millions of requests per day.

Qualifications

• BASIC QUALIFICATIONS include deep low-level systems programming in C/C++ or Rust.
• Experience with large-scale, high-concurrent production serving.
• Experience with GPU inference engines (e.g., vLLM, SGLang, Triton, TensorRT-LLM).
• Strong background in system optimizations: batching, caching, load balancing, parallelism.
• Algorithmic inference optimizations: quantization, speculative decoding, distillation, low-precision numerics.
• Experience with testing, benchmarking, and reliability of inference services.
• Experience designing and implementing CI/CD infrastructure for inference.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement scalable distributed infrastructure for model serving (load balancing, auto-scaling, batch scheduling, global KV cache).
• Optimize latency and throughput of model inference under real production workloads.
• Build reliable, high-concurrency serving systems that serve billions of users with high uptime, low error rate, and excellent tail latency.
• Benchmark, fine-tune, and accelerate inference engines (including low-level GPU kernel work and code generation).
• Develop custom tools to trace, replay, and fix issues across the full stack — from orchestration down to GPU kernels.
• Create robust CI/CD infrastructure for seamless endpoint deployment, image publishing, and inference engine updates.
• Accelerate research on scaling test-time compute, RL rollout, and model-hardware co-design for next-generation systems.

Skills

C/C++/Rust

Large-scale serving

GPU inference engines

System optimizations

Inference optimizations

Testing & benchmarking

CI/CD for inference

Job description

SpaceXAI is building a high-performance inference platform used by Grok at scale. As a Member of Technical Staff - Inference, you will design and optimize distributed infrastructure for model serving, including global KV caching, batching, and auto-scaling, with deep GPU kernel work and code generation.

You will own everything from distributed infrastructure to low-level optimizations, shaping how fast and reliably users interact with Grok across millions of requests per day.