Software Engineer, LLM Infrastructure

Fireworks AI; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Fireworks AI is seeking a Software Engineer for our AI Infrastructure team to design core systems powering the generative platform. You will build scalable backend services, pipelines, and model serving components to ensure reliability and performance.

Collaborate with cloud, performance, and product teams to translate research into robust infrastructure, participate in CI/CD, and help advance open ML tooling and Kubernetes-based workflows.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3 years in software engineering, with focus on infrastructure or ML systems.
• Strong Python/Go programming skills and solid coding practices.
• Experience with ML infra tooling (PyTorch, MLflow, Vertex AI, SageMaker, Kubernetes).
• Basic understanding of LLM concepts such as context length and KV cache memory.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to scalable backend infrastructure for distributed training, inference, and data pipelines.
• Build and maintain core backend services like CI/CD, control plane, and model serving systems.
• Support performance, cost efficiency, and reliability across compute, storage, and networking layers.
• Collaborate with performance, training, and product teams to translate research into infrastructure solutions.
• Participate in code reviews and CI/CD processes.

Skills

Python

Go

ML infra

Kubernetes

Distributed systems

Performance

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

MLflow

Vertex AI

SageMaker

Kubernetes

vLLM / SgLang / TRT-LLM

Job description

About Us

Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI.

The Role

As a Software Engineer on our AI Infrastructure team, you will help design the core systems that power Fireworks AI's generative AI platform. You will help build infrastructure and tools that ensure the reliability, performance, quality, and availability of our AI system.

Our mission is to make Fireworks AI the most reliable and user friendly generative AI platform in the world. You will partner closely with our cloud infrastructure team, product team, and performance team to deliver infrastructure that bridges the gap between our customer and the ultra-performant proprietary Fireworks inference engine.

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design and development of scalable backend infrastructure that supports distributed training, inference, and data pipelines
• Build and maintain core backend services such as LLM CI/CD pipeline, control plane, and model serving systems
• Support performance optimization, cost efficiency, and reliability improvements across compute, storage, and networking layers
• Building frameworks and safeguards to ensure Fireworks AI has the best model quality in the industry
• Collaborate with performance, training, and product teams to translate research and product needs into infrastructure solutions
• Participate in code reviews, technical discussions, and continuous integration and deployment processes

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 3 years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on infrastructure or machine learning systems
• Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or a similar language
• Proven experience in ML infrastructure and tooling (e.g., PyTorch, MLflow, Vertex AI, SageMaker, Kubernetes, etc.).
• Basic understanding of LLM knowledge (e.g., context length, disaggregated prefill, KV cache memory estimation, etc)

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on infrastructure or machine learning systems
• Experience with open source inference engine like vLLM, Sglang, or TRT-LLM
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or ML projects
• Experience in building large scale ML/MLOps infrastructure

Why Fireworks?

• Solve Hard Problems: Tackle challenges at the forefront of AI infrastructure, from low-latency inference to scalable model serving.
• Build What's Next: Work with bleeding-edge technology that impacts how businesses and developers harness AI globally.
• Ownership & Impact: Join a fast-growing, passionate team where your work directly shapes the future of AI - no bureaucracy, just results.
• Learn from the Best: Collaborate with world-class engineers and AI researchers who thrive on curiosity and innovation.

Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all innovators.

Compensation Range: $175K - $220K