Senior / Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Serving - Germany

Inworld; Germany (OH); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI technology firm in the United States is seeking an experienced engineer to optimize model performance. The role requires expertise in inference optimization, model acceleration, and proficiency in C++, CUDA, and Python, among other skills. You'll work collaboratively with teams to tackle complex problems, ensuring high-quality outcomes. Professional fluency in English is essential for daily collaboration. The company provides potential relocation support for candidates interested in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of modern serving frameworks and techniques.
• Hands-on experience with quantization, distillation, and continuous batching.
• Proficiency in C++, CUDA, Rust, or optimised Python.

Responsibilities

• Optimize model serving and ensure reliability in production.
• Collaborate with US-based teams on unclear problems.
• Take ownership from research to production.

Skills

Inference Optimization

Model Acceleration

High-Performance Systems

Distributed Systems & Scaling

Public work

Full-cycle ownership

Background in CS, Physics, or Math

Professional fluency in English

Education

PhD in CS, Physics, Math, or equivalent

Job description

Who We're Looking For

A year ago, reliably working agentic systems and sub‑second multimodal inference at scale barely existed. Nobody has a decade of experience here. So we’re not screening for a resume template — we’re looking for strong people from varied backgrounds who learn fast, thrive in ambiguity, and can show us what they’ve built, broken, and understood.

Experience We Find Useful

• Inference Optimization. Deep understanding of modern serving frameworks and techniques like vLLM or TRT‑LLM.
• Model Acceleration. Hands‑on experience with quantization, distillation, caching strategies, continuous batching, paged attention, and speculative decoding.
• High‑Performance Systems. Proficiency in C++, CUDA, Rust, or highly optimised Python. You know how to profile code and squeeze every ounce of performance out of NVIDIA GPUs.
• Distributed Systems & Scaling. Experience with Kubernetes, Ray, custom load balancing, multi‑GPU/multi‑node inference, and reliably handling thousands of concurrent connections.
• Public work. Non‑trivial systems programming projects, open‑source contributions to major inference engines, or deep‑dive technical write‑ups.
• Full‑cycle ownership. You can take a model from the research team, containerise it, optimise its serving, and ensure it runs reliably in production.
• Background. PhD in CS, Physics, Math, or equivalent practical experience building backend or ML systems.
• Professional fluency in English. Written and spoken is required, as you will be collaborating daily with our US‑based leadership and engineering teams.

Who Thrives Here

• You don’t need a roadmap to start walking; you’re comfortable picking a direction and building the map as you go.
• You believe engineering isn’t finished until it’s shipped and stable. You have a bias for impact over purely theoretical optimisations.
• You don’t just ship code; you obsess over the why. You’re the first to question an architecture if you think there’s a better way to solve the core latency or throughput problem.
• You aren’t satisfied with "the PM said so." You thrive on deep context and want to understand the fundamental logic behind every decision we make.

What Working Here Is Like

We hand you unclear problems and expect you to make them clear. We value engineers who say "I don’t know yet" and then design the benchmark or prototype that finds out. We treat performance, latency, and reliability as first‑class product features, not a box to check before launch. Impact comes before everything else, though we support sharing work and open‑source contributions that move the field forward. Your work should be visible. Flat structure, fast iterations, minimal process theatre.

Relocation Support

For candidates interested in relocating to the San‑Francisco Bay Area in the future, full US visa and relocation support may be available, subject to business needs and applicable legal and work authorisation requirements.