Senior AI Inference Cloud Lead Engineer

Akamai Technologies, Inc.; Frankfort (KY); On-site; USD 146,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is seeking a Senior II Software Engineer Lead to oversee the design and implementation of critical components of our globally distributed AI inference platform.

You will lead hands-on development to deliver OpenAI-compatible endpoints while orchestrating inference workloads across regions, mentoring engineers, and guiding technical direction. The role requires strong experience in distributed systems, cloud services, containerization, and modern DevOps practices.

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.
• Expertise in containerization and orchestration technologies including Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud services

Platform engineering

AI inference

Model serving

LLM deployment

API design

GPU infrastructure

Observability

CI/CD / DevOps

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

TensorRT

vLLM

TorchServe

Triton

Job description

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is seeking a Senior II Software Engineer Lead to oversee the design and implementation of critical components of our globally distributed AI inference platform.

You will lead hands-on development to deliver OpenAI-compatible endpoints while orchestrating inference workloads across regions, mentoring engineers, and guiding technical direction. The role requires strong experience in distributed systems, cloud services, containerization, and modern DevOps practices.