Inference Systems Engineer — Scalable, Reliable ML Serving

Speedrun Talent Network; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision benefits

Unlimited PTO

Paid parental leave

Relocation support

Job summary

Thinking Machines is hiring a Software Engineer, Inference to own the reliability, scale, and efficiency of the systems that serve our models to real users. This production-facing role sits at the center of the company, bridging cutting-edge inference techniques with the day-to-day reality of serving real traffic.

You’ll operate and scale production inference systems, own model rollout processes, and collaborate with research teams to productionize new serving techniques while maintaining high

Qualifications

• Experience operating large-scale, latency-sensitive production systems.
• Proficiency in Python and Go or another systems language.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and incident response for production services.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and how they fail at scale.

Responsibilities

• Operate and scale the production inference systems that serve live traffic, including Tinker's multi-tenant serving platform.
• Own the rollout process for new models, model versions, and inference optimizations, ensuring safe, incremental deployment to production.
• Build and improve observability, alerting, and capacity planning so the team can detect, diagnose, and resolve production issues quickly.
• Partner with inference and research teams to productionize new serving techniques without compromising reliability.
• Lead incident response for production inference issues, driving root cause analysis and durable fixes.
• Design for graceful degradation, failover, and redundancy so that serving stays resilient as usage grows.
• Manage capacity and cost tradeoffs for serving infrastructure as traffic and model sizes scale.

Skills

Python

Go

Observability

Distributed systems

Incident response

Job description

Thinking Machines is hiring a Software Engineer, Inference to own the reliability, scale, and efficiency of the systems that serve our models to real users. This production-facing role sits at the center of the company, bridging cutting-edge inference techniques with the day-to-day reality of serving real traffic.

You’ll operate and scale production inference systems, own model rollout processes, and collaborate with research teams to productionize new serving techniques while maintaining high