Senior/Staff AI Engineer

DDN; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

DDN is hiring an AI Engineer to work on critical infrastructure for AI systems in San Francisco. This role focuses on optimizing performance across GPU and CPU pathways and building systems that efficiently serve AI workloads.

The ideal candidate has a strong background in production AI systems and experience with distributed systems. A PhD is preferred but not mandatory if substantial real-world experience is demonstrated.

The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $250,000, reflecting the critical nature of the work.

Qualifications

• Experience building or optimizing production AI systems.
• Understanding of how inference performance interacts between compute, memory, and storage.
• Proven ownership in areas like model serving, caching, or distributed performance.

Responsibilities

• Build and optimize LLM serving and inference systems.
• Improve performance across GPU and CPU pathways.
• Solve engineering problems at the intersection of AI and high-performance systems.

Skills

Production AI systems optimization

GPU and CPU performance tuning

Distributed systems experience

Memory and storage efficiency

Architecture decisions and implementation

Education

PhD or equivalent experience in AI or related field

Job description

Build the AI infrastructure layer that determines whether modern models actually work in production.

Most AI roles sit at the application layer. This one does not.

At DDN, we’re hiring an AI Engineer to work on the hard part of AI: the systems, storage, and performance infrastructure behind real-world model serving and inference. This is the role for engineers who care about what happens under load, at scale, and in production — not just in demos.

If your background sits at the intersection of AI infrastructure, distributed systems, and performance engineering, this is the kind of role where your depth will matter.

Job Description

What you’ll do

• Build and optimize LLM serving and inference systems for production environments
• Improve performance across GPU and CPU pathways
• Work on KV cache, memory, storage, and throughput bottlenecks
• Design and scale systems that support RAG and retrieval-heavy AI workloads
• Contribute to infrastructure where storage architecture and systems efficiency materially affect AI performance
• Solve engineering problems at the intersection of AI, high-performance systems, and distributed infrastructure

What we’re looking for

• An engineer who has spent meaningful time building or optimizing production AI systems, not just experimenting with models
• Someone who understands how inference performance is shaped by the interaction between compute, memory, storage, and serving architecture
• Deep hands‑on experience working close to the systems layer — for example, improving how workloads run across GPU and CPU resources, reducing bottlenecks, or tuning infrastructure for better throughput and latency
• Evidence of real ownership in areas like model serving, retrieval, caching, storage, or distributed performance, rather than purely application‑layer AI work
• The ability to move comfortably between architecture decisions and hands‑on implementation, especially in environments where efficiency and scale matter
• A background that suggests you can operate in technically demanding environments, whether that comes from AI infrastructure, high-performance systems, storage platforms, or adjacent distributed systems work
• PhD preferred, but far less important than having built serious systems in the real world

Why this role is compelling

• This is not a “prompt engineering” job.
• This is not an “AI wrapper” job.
• This is not a generic backend role with AI sprinkled on top.
• This is a chance to work on the infrastructure that determines whether modern AI systems are fast, scalable, efficient, and commercially viable.
• If you want to work on the real mechanics of AI performance — serving, retrieval, compute efficiency, memory behavior, storage architecture, and inference at scale — this is where that work happens.

Who will love this role

• Engineers who enjoy deep systems problems
• Builders who care about performance, scale, and architecture
• People who want to work where AI meets infrastructure
• Candidates who would rather solve hard technical bottlenecks than ship surface‑level AI features

This Role Is Not For

• Purely academic researchers without meaningful production ownership
• Generic software engineers without clear AI systems or inference depth
• Candidates focused mainly on prompt engineering or lightweight application integrations
• MLOps generalists who have not worked deeply on serving, storage, or performance‑critical AI systems

Salary Range: $150,000 - $250,000

DDN

Why DDN — DDN has deep credibility in high-performance infrastructure, and this role sits in a part of the market where that foundation matters. If you want to build the systems serious AI depends on — rather than the layer that merely sits on top of it — this is a rare opportunity to do exactly that.

Apply if you want to build the infrastructure behind production AI — not just consume it.