Member of Technical Staff, Generalist

Inception; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity

Flexible PTO

Health insurance

401k match

Catered meals

Commuter subsidies

Inclusive culture

Job summary

Inception, based in Palo Alto / Bay Area, seeks a highly versatile Member of Technical Staff, Generalist to contribute across AI model infrastructure, diffusion techniques, and language tasks. This in-office, full-time role blends research with hands-on engineering to accelerate the Mercury diffusion LLM and push the boundaries of performance, efficiency, and quality.

You'll collaborate with world-class researchers and engineers, shape foundational technology, and have an immediate impact on

Job description

View all jobs Member of Technical Staff, Generalist Bay Area Engineering In office Full-time Inception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Our Mercury model is the world’s fastest reasoning LLM and first commercially available diffusion LLM, delivering 5x greater speed and efficiency than today’s LLMs, with best-in-class quality. We are the AI researchers and engineers behind such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO.

The Role

If you believe you can make a meaningful contribution to our team but aren't sure which of our specialized roles is the best fit, this is the listing for you.

Why Join Inception

• Work with World-Class Talent: Collaborate with the inventors of diffusion models and leading AI researchers
• Shape Foundational Technology: Your decisions will influence how the next generation of AI products are built and used
• Immediate Impact: Join at the ground floor where your contributions directly shape product direction and company trajectory

Perks & Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity in a rapidly growing startup
• Flexible vacation and paid time off (PTO)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401k match
• Catered meals (breakfast, lunch, & dinner)
• Commuter subsidies
• A collaborative and inclusive culture

About Us

Inception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Today’s autoregressive LLMs generate tokens sequentially, which makes them painfully slow and expensive. Inception’s diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs) generate answers in parallel. They are 5x faster and more efficient, while delivering best-in-class quality. Inception was co-founded by Stanford professorStefano Ermon , who co-invented such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO, UCLA professorAditya Grover , who co-invented node2vec, decision transformers, and d1 reasoning, and Cornell professor and Afresh co-founderVolodymyr Kuleshov , who co-invented MDLM and Block Diffusion. We pioneered the application of diffusion to language, with world’s first (and only) commercially available dLLM, Mercury. We are currently deploying our large-scale diffusion LLMs at Fortune 500 companies. Diffusion is the technology behind today’s image and video AI, and we’re making it the standard for LLMs as well. Our team includes engineers from AWS, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft, HashiCorp, and OpenAI. Based in Palo Alto, CA, we are backed by top-tier venture capitalists, including Menlo Ventures, Mayfield, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Snowflake Ventures, Databricks, and Innovation Endeavors, and by tech luminaries such as Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy, and Eric Schmidt.

Our Commitment

We are an equal opportunity employer and encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply.

If you are talented, innovative, and ambitious, come help us invent the future of AI.