Senior Inference Engineer

Uniphore; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 159,000 - 199,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual incentive

Stock options

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) with match

Paid time off

Birthday leave

Job summary

Uniphore is seeking a Senior or Staff Inference Engineer to own the inference layer for an enterprise AI platform. You will combine deep model inference expertise with systems engineering to deliver context-aware runtime serving finetuned SLMs across cloud, on-premises, and GPU platforms.

You will build and optimize KV-cache, speculative decoding, and multi-GPU execution, while managing model and adapter lifecycles and ensuring reliable production deployments with strong observability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years engineering, including 3+ years hands-on with GPU systems, distributed inference, or ML serving.
• Production experience with vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM.
• Strong Python and C++ (C++17/20); ability to read and debug CUDA C++ or HIP kernels.
• Hands-on GPU profiling and performance optimization.

Responsibilities

• Build context-aware runtime: integrate context selection, compression, conversation compaction, and persistent task state with model execution.
• KV-cache and prompt-prefix-cache management, cache-aware routing, retention, eviction, and offloading.
• Inference performance: implement and tune speculative decoding, attention kernels, continuous batching, quantization, and multi-GPU execution.
• Adapter lifecycle: model/adapter lifecycle management, multi-adapter serving, zero-downtime hot swapping, and resource scheduling.
• Production reliability: observability, tenant isolation, overload protection, failure recovery, safe rollout and rollback.
• Cross-environment deployment: portable runtime integrations across NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, cloud and on-prem, single or multi-GPU.

Skills

Python

C++

GPU systems

Distributed inference

ML serving

Performance profiling

Tools

CUDA

HIP

Triton

CUTLASS

Job description

Uniphore is the Business AI company. Our sovereign, composable and secure AI platform connects enterprise data, fine-tunes AI models and deploys agentic AI across the enterprise. We empower every worker to boost productivity and help businesses grow faster, operate smarter and reduce costs. Trusted by more than 2,000 businesses globally, and recognized on the Deloitte Fast 500, Uniphore delivers on the promise of AI as a transformative force for business.

Job Description

Staff Inference Engineer –

Uniphore is building an enterprise AI platform where agents operate across voice, video, text, and structured data in real time. We are looking for a Senior or Staff Inference Engineer to own the inference layer — combining deep model inference expertise with systems engineering to deliver a context-aware runtime serving finetuned SLMs across cloud, on-premises, and widely used GPU platforms.

This is a hands‑on individual contributor role working closely with Uniphore’s research, model engineering, knowledge systems, agent, and pla4orm teams.

What You Will Build Context‑aware runtime: Integrate context selection, compression, conversation compaction, and persistent task state with model execution. Adapt context budgets, model selection, and reasoning effort to each task.

KV-cache and computation optimization

Build paged KV-cache and prompt‑prefix‑cache management, cache‑aware routing, retention, eviction, and offloading. Preserve correctness as context, permissions, model versions, and adapters change.

Inference performance

Implement and tune speculative decoding, aQention kernels, continuous batching, quantization, chunked prefill, and multi‑GPU parallel execution.

SLM and adapter lifecycle:

Build model and adapter lifecycle management, multi‑adapter serving, zero‑downtime hot swapping, and resource scheduling.

Production reliability: Implement observability (DCGM, Prometheus, Grafana), tenant isolation, overload protection, failure recovery, and safe rollout and rollback.

Cross‑environment deployment:

Build portable runtime integrations across NVIDIA and AMD GPU pla4orms, cloud and on‑premises environments, and single‑or‑multi‑GPU configurations.

Technical Expertise

Model inference internals: Autoregressive generation, prefill vs. decoding, aQention architectures, compute- vs. memory-bound execution, numerical precision.

Speculative decoding: DraY-and-verify execution, acceptance/rejection sampling, adaptive speculation, and throughput tradeoffs.

GPU kernels: FlashAQention-style kernels, tiling, operator fusion, memory access paQerns.

CUDA, HIP, Triton, or CUTLASS proficiency.

KV and prefix caching: Paged KV storage, fragmentation, cache quantization, offloading, cross request prefix reuse, tenant isolation.

Context-window management: Token budgeting, context selection, prompt compression, conversation compaction, sliding window and sparse aQention.

Serving and scaling: Continuous batching, chunked prefill, admission control, quantization, multi‑GPU parallelism, prefill/decode disaggregation.

Qualifications Required

• 5+ years engineering, including 3+ years hands‑on with GPU systems, distributed inference, or ML serving
• Production experience with vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT‑LLM
• Strong Python and C++ (C++17/20)ti ability to read and debug CUDA C++ or HIP kernels
• Hands‑on GPU profiling and performance optimization

Preferred

• Custom GPU kernel development (CUDA, HIP, Triton, CUTLASS)
• PyTorch internals — torch. Compile, custom operators, MoE or disaggregated prefill/decode
• LoRA/SLM adapter serving and zero‑downtime hot swapping
• NVIDIA and AMD Instinct hardware in production
• Telemetry with DCGM, AMD SMI, Prometheus, and Grafana

Hiring Pay Range

$159,000 - $198,800

Benefits

In addition to competitive base pay, this position also includes an annual incentive opportunity based on target achievement, pre‑IPO stock options, benefits including medical, dental, vision, 401(k) with a match, and more, plus generous paid time off, paid holidays, paid day off for your birthday and other paid leave policies to support employees through all phases of life.

Location preference:

USA - CA - Palo Alto

Uniphore is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity in the workplace. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics.

For more information on how Uniphore uses AI to unify—and humanize—every enterprise experience, please visitwww.uniphore.com.