Lead AI Platform Engineer

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 236,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Model Infrastructure platform, designing scalable AI request systems and partnering with AI Research, Product Engineering, and external providers to ensure reliability and efficiency.

You will own high availability, latency optimization, and observability while mentoring engineers and driving cross-team initiatives that enable rapid frontier model adoption.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience building large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience designing and operating highly available production services.
• Strong programming skills in Go, Java, Python, Rust, or C++.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, networking, and observability.
• Experience leading technical projects across multiple engineering teams.
• Ability to balance long-term architecture with pragmatic execution.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Passion for building foundational platforms that enable other engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of the company's Model Infrastructure platform.
• Build systems to ensure high availability, low latency, and operational excellence for AI inference.
• Design and improve the Unified Model Controller (UMC) and Model Selector platform to route traffic based on reliability, latency, quality, compliance, and cost.
• Develop systems for model provisioning, capacity management, failover, and traffic engineering across multiple AI providers.
• Integrate new model providers and maintain provider APIs and SDKs for rapid adoption of frontier models.
• Improve observability through dashboards, alerting, token usage analytics, cost reporting, and end-to-end telemetry.
• Collaborate with Product Engineering to support model launches, experimentation, and proactive monitoring of production AI workloads.
• Drive infrastructure efficiency through capacity planning, utilization optimization, and cost visibility.
• Collaborate with AI Research to build infrastructure for future model evaluation, training, and deployment.
• Lead cross-functional technical initiatives and mentor engineers.

Skills

Go

Java

Python

Rust

C++

Distributed systems

Leadership

Communication

Tools

Kubernetes

Kafka

Spark

Flink

Airflow

Iceberg

Job description

United States Digital Space LLC in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Model Infrastructure platform, designing scalable AI request systems and partnering with AI Research, Product Engineering, and external providers to ensure reliability and efficiency.

You will own high availability, latency optimization, and observability while mentoring engineers and driving cross-team initiatives that enable rapid frontier model adoption.