Research Engineer - Inference

ElevenLabs; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

ElevenLabs is seeking a Research Engineer to join the research team, focused on deploying frontier AI models in production. You will own systems that turn research breakthroughs into real-time products used by millions, delivering fast, reliable serving.

You will optimize latency, throughput, and cost with techniques like quantization, distillation, caching, and custom kernels, and you will build tooling to ship new models safely and confidently.

Qualifications

• Experience deploying and serving ML models in production.
• Strong engineering skills in GPU programming and inference optimization.
• Ability to profile and diagnose bottlenecks across the serving stack.

Responsibilities

• Deploy state-of-the-art models to production and own the path from research checkpoint to serving infrastructure.
• Optimize inference performance across latency, throughput, and cost using advanced techniques.
• Build high-performance serving systems for real-time, streaming workloads.
• Create tooling and infrastructure enabling researchers to ship new models quickly and safely.

Skills

GPU programming

Inference optimization

Profiling & bottlenecks

Real-time systems

Python

Tools

CUDA

Triton

TensorRT

vLLM

SGLang

Job description

About ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is an AI research and product company transforming how we interact with technology.

About ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is an AI research and product company transforming how we interact with technology.

We launched in January 2023 with the first human-like AI voice model. Today, we serve millions of users and thousands of businesses - from fast-growing startups to large enterprises like Deutsche Telekom and Meta. Our investors are some of the world's most prominent, including Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ Growth and Sequoia. We've raised $781M in funding and our last valuation was $22B - multiples of 11, always.

We Have Expanded From Voice Into Three Main Platforms

• ElevenAgents enables businesses to deliver seamless and intelligent customer experiences, with the integrations, testing, monitoring, and reliability necessary to deploy voice and chat agents at scale.
• ElevenCreative empowers creators and marketers to generate and edit speech, music, image, and video across 70+ languages.
• ElevenAPI gives developers access to our leading AI audio foundational models.

Everything we do is the result of the creativity and commitment of our team - builders doing the best work of their lives. We are researchers, engineers, and operators. IOI medalists and ex-founders. If you want to work hard and create lasting positive impact, we want to hear from you.

How we work

• High-velocity: Rapid experimentation, lean autonomous teams, and minimal bureaucracy.
• Impact not job titles: We don’t have job titles. Instead, it’s about the impact you have. No task is above or beneath you.
• AI first: We use AI to move faster with higher-quality results. We do this across the whole company—from engineering to growth to operations.
• Excellence everywhere: Everything we do should match the quality of our AI models.
• Global team: We prioritize your talent, not your location.

What we offer

• Innovative culture: You’ll be part of a generational opportunity to define the trajectory of AI, surrounded by a team pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
• Growth paths: Joining ElevenLabs means joining a dynamic team with countless opportunities to drive impact - beyond your immediate role and responsibilities.
• Learning & development: ElevenLabs proactively supports professional development through an annual discretionary stipend.
• Social travel: We also provide an annual discretionary stipend to meet up with colleagues each year, however you choose.
• Annual company offsite: Each year, we bring the entire team together in a new location - past offsites have included Croatia and Italy.
• Co-working: If you’re not located near one of our main hubs, we offer a monthly co-working stipend.

About The Role

We are looking for a Research Engineer to join the research team at ElevenLabs, focused on deploying and optimizing our frontier AI models in production. The quality of our models only matters if they can be served fast, reliably, and at scale. You will own the systems that turn research breakthroughs into real-time products used by millions. You will thrive in this role if you enjoy:

• Deploying state-of-the-art models to production and owning the path from research checkpoint to serving infrastructure.
• Optimizing inference performance across the stack, including latency, throughput, and cost, using techniques such as quantization, distillation, KV-cache optimization, batching strategies, and custom kernels.
• Building and tuning high-performance serving systems for real-time, streaming workloads where every millisecond matters.
• Creating tooling and infrastructure that lets researchers ship new models to production quickly, safely, and with confidence in their performance characteristics.

Requirements

We do not require any formal certifications or degrees. Instead, we are seeking enthusiastic engineers who can showcase solving impressively hard problems with artifacts such as past projects, designs, or GitHub contributions. Ideally, you bring:

• Experience deploying and serving ML models in production, ideally for latency-sensitive or real-time applications.
• Strong engineering skills in GPU programming and inference optimization (e.g., CUDA, Triton, TensorRT, or serving frameworks such as vLLM or SGLang).
• The capacity to autonomously profile, diagnose, and eliminate bottlenecks across the serving stack, from model architecture to kernels to orchestration, and to build the tooling to measure it.

Location

This role is remote and can be executed globally. If you prefer, you can work from our offices in London, New York, San Francisco, and Warsaw.

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or other legally protected statuses.