Senior AI Inference Platform Lead

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

Job summary

Akamai is seeking a Senior II Software Engineer Lead to drive the design and implementation of a globally distributed AI inference platform. You’ll lead critical components, optimize AI workloads, and mentor teams to deliver high-performance, reliable systems across regions.

You will shape technical direction, collaborate on platform standards, and ensure operational excellence while delivering OpenAI-compatible endpoints and scalable AI services.

Qualifications

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

Model serving

LLM deployment

Kubernetes

Docker

CI/CD

Infrastructure as code

Mentoring

API design

REST/gRPC

GPU infrastructure

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

TensorRT

vLLM

TorchServe

Triton

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

Akamai is seeking a Senior II Software Engineer Lead to drive the design and implementation of a globally distributed AI inference platform. You’ll lead critical components, optimize AI workloads, and mentor teams to deliver high-performance, reliable systems across regions.

You will shape technical direction, collaborate on platform standards, and ensure operational excellence while delivering OpenAI-compatible endpoints and scalable AI services.