LLM Inference Systems Engineer

Hippocratic AI Inc.; Menlo Park, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Hippocratic AI is seeking an inference systems engineer to build the distributed serving and high‑performance networking layer behind our LLMs. You will own the path from model server to GPU fabric, optimize multi‑node inference, and productionize serving with observability in production.

You will collaborate with Model, Infrastructure, and Application engineering to launch new models and features while focusing on reliability and performance across compute, memory, and network paths.

Qualifications

• Production experience building or operating distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of LLM inference, including parallelism and batching.
• Hands-on experience with GPU communication and networking technologies.
• Strong Python skills and working proficiency in C++ or another systems language.
• Ability to profile and debug performance across layers.
• Experience deploying workloads on Kubernetes with reliability and observability.
• Clear written and verbal communication across teams.
• Master's or PhD required.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate disaggregated LLM serving architectures.
• Optimize multi-node inference across GPU systems using high-speed interconnects.
• Build and tune serving systems with appropriate frameworks.
• Profile end-to-end performance and improve latency and throughput.
• Develop benchmark and capacity-planning workflows across models and GPUs.
• Productionize serving on Kubernetes with health checks and observability.

Skills

Distributed systems

LLM inference

GPU networking

Python

C++

Performance profiling

Kubernetes

Technical communication

High performance computing

Education

Master's or PhD

Tools

NCCL

NVLink/NVSwitch

InfiniBand

RoCE

RDMA

UCX

TensorRT-LLM

SGLang

vLLM

Job description

ABOUT THE ROLE

We’re seeking an inference systems engineer to build the distributed serving and high-performance networking layer behind our large language models. You will own the path from model server to GPU fabric: prefill/decode disaggregation, KV-cache transfer, multi-node execution, and the observability and benchmarks needed to make those systems reliable in production. This role sits in the Inference team within the company’s Model team and partners closely with Model, Infrastructure, and Application engineering.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Design, implement, and operate disaggregated LLM serving architectures, including independent prefill and decode pools, KV-cache transfer, routing, batching, and failure recovery.

• Optimize multi-node inference across modern GPU systems using NVLink, NVSwitch, NVLS, InfiniBand, RoCEv2, GPUDirect RDMA, NCCL, UCX, and related communication paths.

• Build and tune serving systems using SGLang, vLLM, NVIDIA Dynamo, TensorRT-LLM, or comparable frameworks.

• Profile end-to-end performance across compute, memory, network, and storage; improve time to first token, inter-token latency, throughput, tail latency, and cost per token.

• Develop repeatable benchmark and capacity-planning workflows across model architectures, GPU types, parallelism strategies, and concurrency levels.

• Productionize serving on Kubernetes with health checks, autoscaling, safe rollouts, metrics, tracing, and actionable diagnostics.

• Diagnose complex distributed failures such as collective timeouts, topology mismatches, packet loss, congestion, KV-transfer stalls, GPU OOMs, and uneven load.

• Partner with model researchers and platform engineers to launch new models, serving features, and hardware generations safely.

LOCATION REQUIREMENT

We believe the best ideas happen together. To support fast collaboration and a strong team culture, this role is expected to be in our Menlo Park office five days a week, unless otherwise specified.

WHAT YOU BRING

Must-Have:

• Production experience building or operating distributed systems, high-performance computing systems, or large-scale ML inference platforms.

• Strong understanding of LLM inference, including tensor/pipeline/data parallelism, continuous batching, KV-cache management, and prefill/decode behavior.

• Hands‑on experience with GPU communication and networking technologies such as NCCL, NVLink/NVSwitch, InfiniBand, RoCE, RDMA, UCX, or equivalent systems.

• Strong Python skills and working proficiency in C++ or another systems language.

• Ability to profile and debug performance across application, runtime, kernel, network, and infrastructure layers.

• Experience deploying production workloads on Kubernetes and operating them with clear reliability and observability standards.

• Clear written and verbal communication across research, infrastructure, and product-facing teams.

• Master's or PhD Required

Nice-to-Have:

• Direct experience with disaggregated serving, KV-cache transfer, NVIDIA Dynamo/NIXL, SGLang, vLLM, or TensorRT-LLM.

• Experience with NVLS, SHARP, GPUDirect RDMA, UCX, RDMA congestion control, or GPU-cluster topology optimization.

• CUDA, Triton, custom kernel, or low-level GPU performance experience.

• Experience with speculative decoding, multi-LoRA serving, quantization, or cache‑aware routing.

• Contributions to open‑source inference, networking, or distributed‑systems projects.

• Experience benchmarking new GPU platforms and turning results into production architecture decisions.

REFERENCES

• Polaris: A Safety-focused LLM Constellation Architecture for Healthcare — https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13313

• Polaris 2 — https://www.hippocraticai.com/polaris2

• Personalized Interactions — https://www.hippocraticai.com/personalized-interactions

• Human Touch in AI — https://www.hippocraticai.com/the-human-touch-in-ai

• Empathetic Intelligence — https://www.hippocraticai.com/empathetic-intelligence

Why Join Hippocratic AI

Reinvent healthcare with AI that puts safety first. We’re building the world’s first healthcare‑only, safety‑focused LLM — a breakthrough platform designed to transform patient outcomes at a global scale. This is category creation.

Work with the people shaping the future. Hippocratic AI was co‑founded by CEO Munjal Shah and a team of physicians, hospital leaders, AI pioneers, and researchers from institutions like El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.

Backed by the world’s leading healthcare and AI investors. We recently raised a $126M Series C at a $3.5B valuation, led by Avenir Growth, bringing total funding to $404M with participation from CapitalG, General Catalyst, a16z, Kleiner Perkins, Premji Invest, UHS, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, John Doerr, Rick Klausner, and others.

Build alongside the best in healthcare and AI. Join experts who’ve spent their careers improving care, advancing science, and building world‑changing technologies — ensuring our platform is powerful, trusted, and truly transformative.

Equal Opportunity

Hippocratic AI is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are committed to building a team that reflects the patients we serve. We actively encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds. If you require accommodations during the hiring process, please contact [e-mail].