Senior Model Serving & API Backend Engineer

Black Forest Labs; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Black Forest Labs is a leader in foundational AI models for image and video. Based in Freiburg with a growing presence in San Francisco, we seek engineers who can bridge research breakthroughs and production systems.

You will design scalable APIs and optimize GPU inference, collaborating with researchers to move ideas to live endpoints rapidly. This role spans backend systems, GPU performance, and production ML serving, offering a hybrid setup with in-person weeks and travel support between

Qualifications

• Strong judgment around performance, reliability, and cost tradeoffs.
• Experience scaling APIs or ML systems under load.
• Comfort working in fast-moving, research-adjacent environments.
• Ownership from system design through debugging and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Turn research checkpoints into production-ready inference services.
• Design and maintain high-performance APIs serving millions of requests.
• Optimize inference latency and throughput across GPU infrastructure.
• Build scalable serving architectures that handle unpredictable traffic.
• Improve reliability, monitoring, and observability across model-serving systems.
• Prototype and ship demos that showcase new capabilities in days, not weeks.
• Collaborate closely with researchers to move from idea to live endpoint rapidly.

Skills

Performance tradeoffs

API scaling

ML systems

System ownership

Tools

Python

FastAPI

async systems

GPU infrastructure

CUDA

Docker

Kubernetes

Redis

Postgres

distributed task queues

AWS

GCP

Azure

observability stacks

Job description

Black Forest Labs is a leader in foundational AI models for image and video. Based in Freiburg with a growing presence in San Francisco, we seek engineers who can bridge research breakthroughs and production systems.

You will design scalable APIs and optimize GPU inference, collaborating with researchers to move ideas to live endpoints rapidly. This role spans backend systems, GPU performance, and production ML serving, offering a hybrid setup with in-person weeks and travel support between