Remote Senior AI Inference Platform Lead

Akamai; Cambridge (MA); Remote; USD 146,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

Akamai is seeking a Senior II Software Engineer Lead to drive design and implementation of the AI inference platform, delivering OpenAI-compatible endpoints and orchestrating workloads across regions.

You will mentor engineers, shape technical direction, and ensure scalable, high-performance systems with modern DevOps practices. The role requires strong containerization skills and API design experience.

Qualifications

• 8 years of relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree or its equivalent.
• Solid proficiency in distributed systems, cloud services, and platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience with AI inference, model serving, or LLM deployment with working knowledge of inference frameworks (TensorRT, vLLM, TorchServe, Triton).
• Expertise in containerization and orchestration technologies including Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud-native architectures.
• Proven experience building scalable, high-performance systems with modern DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Solid technical leadership through mentoring, code quality advocacy, and ability to drive technical solutions for complex problems.
• Familiarity with API design and development (REST/gRPC patterns), GPU infrastructure and hardware acceleration.
• Knowledge of observability, monitoring, and debugging distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Leading the design and implementation of critical platform components for Akamai Inference Cloud, ensuring performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Driving technical decisions for your domain, selecting appropriate tools, frameworks, and approaches for AI inference workloads.
• Mentoring and guiding engineers on the team through code reviews, design discussions, and technical problem-solving.
• Implementing and optimizing containerized AI workloads with hardware-specific optimizations and integrating inference frameworks at scale.
• Collaborating across teams to define technical requirements, contribute to platform standards, and ensure operational excellence.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud services

Platform engineering

AI inference

Kubernetes

Docker

CI/CD

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

TensorRT

vLLM

TorchServe

Triton

Job description

Akamai is seeking a Senior II Software Engineer Lead to drive design and implementation of the AI inference platform, delivering OpenAI-compatible endpoints and orchestrating workloads across regions.

You will mentor engineers, shape technical direction, and ensure scalable, high-performance systems with modern DevOps practices. The role requires strong containerization skills and API design experience.