Model API Engineer - High-Performance Inference

Jobzhr; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation with equity

100% medical, dental, vision for you +

Flexible PTO including Winter Break

Paid parental leave

Fertility and family-building stipend

Company-facilitated 401(k)

Exposure to ML startups

Job summary

Baseten is hiring for a Model Performance role in the United States. You will design, build, and operate the Model APIs surface powering hosted endpoints for open‑source models, with a focus on speed, reliability, and scale.

You will profile GPU kernels, optimize multi‑GPU serving, and productionize performance improvements across runtimes. You will also implement API versioning, metering, quotas, and authentication while collaborating with cross‑functional teams to deliver robust,

Qualifications

• 3+ years experience building and operating distributed systems or large‑scale APIs.
• Proven track record of owning low‑latency, reliable backend services (rate‑limiting, auth, quotas, metering, migrations).
• Infra instincts with performance sensibilities: profiling, tracing, capacity planning, and SLO management.
• Comfortable debugging complex systems, from runtime internals to GPU execution traces.
• Strong written communication; able to produce clear design docs and collaborate across functions.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the Model APIs surface with focus on advanced inference capabilities: structured outputs (JSON mode, grammar-constrained generation), tool/function calling and multi-modal serving
• Profile and optimize TensorRT-LLM kernels, analyze CUDA kernel performance, implement custom CUDA operators, tune memory allocation patterns for maximum throughput and optimize communication patterns across multi-GPU setups
• Productionize performance improvements across runtimes with deep understanding of their internals: speculative decoding implementations, guided generation for structured outputs, custom scheduling and routing algorithms for high-performance serving
• Build comprehensive benchmarking frameworks that measure real-world performance across different model architectures, batch sizes, sequence lengths, and hardware configurations
• Productionize performance improvements across runtimes (e.g.TensorRT, TensorRT‑LLM): speculative decoding, quantization, batching, and KV‑cache reuse.
• Instrument deep observability (metrics, traces, logs) and build repeatable benchmarks to measure speed, reliability, and quality.
• Implement platform fundamentals: API versioning, validation, usage metering, quotas, and authentication.
• Collaborate closely with other teams to deliver robust, developer‑friendly model serving experiences.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend services

Low-latency

Tools

Kubernetes

API gateways

Service meshes

Distributed scheduling

Job description

Baseten is hiring for a Model Performance role in the United States. You will design, build, and operate the Model APIs surface powering hosted endpoints for open‑source models, with a focus on speed, reliability, and scale.

You will profile GPU kernels, optimize multi‑GPU serving, and productionize performance improvements across runtimes. You will also implement API versioning, metering, quotas, and authentication while collaborating with cross‑functional teams to deliver robust,