Software Engineer, ML Serving - Rime Ai

Unusual; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity upside

Direct collaboration with teams

High ownership and low bureaucracy

Job summary

Unusual in San Francisco is seeking a Software Engineer to architect and build the serving infrastructure that connects their voice AI systems to the world. This role combines ML systems with cloud infrastructure to enable real-time voice processing.

The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in multinode ML serving and strong cloud infrastructure skills, with a focus on production reliability. Join a leading voice AI company at an exciting time in their development.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with real-time multinode ML serving infrastructure.
• Experience with distributed model serving and cloud infrastructure.
• On-call responsibilities and strong focus on production reliability.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement Rime's TTS serving infrastructure.
• Optimize models for disaggregated fleet serving.
• Implement continuous integration and deployment workflows.

Skills

Real-time multinode ML serving infrastructure

Distributed model serving

Cloud infrastructure fundamentals

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

gRPC or bidirectional binary streaming protocols

Audio streaming technologies

Configuration management tooling

SRE/DevOps/Platform engineering

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Rime is a foundation modeling company that builds voice AI for enterprises running customer experiences at scale. Our models are purpose-built for high-volume conversational deployments, engineered for the accuracy, performance, and deployment flexibility that production environments actually demand.

We started from a different premise than the rest of the field: build voice AI for human connection, not slop. Before we trained a single model, we built our own corpus: full-duplex, studio-quality conversational speech of normal people, recorded and annotated by linguists. It's why our models are unparalleled in naturalism, and it's why enterprises pick Rime when pilots need to make it to production.

Role Overview

We're hiring a Software Engineer to own the serving infrastructure that connects Rime's inference engines to the world. This role sits at the intersection of ML systems and cloud infrastructure — you'll work directly on model inference and cloud infrastructure to build, harden, and scale the systems that stream voice at real‑time latency. As Rime moves toward its next‑generation architecture, you'll be a core architect of how our models get served.

Responsibilities

• Architecture and implementation of Rime's TTS serving infrastructure, from GPU‑backed inference engines to the API surface.
• Model optimization from a single‑node to disaggregated fleet serving.
• Compatibility with different NVIDIA hardwares from Hopper to Blackwell and beyond for on‑prem and cloud deployments.
• Continuous integration and deployment workflows for the model serving pipeline.
• Site reliability: on‑call rotation, monitoring, alerting, and observability across the serving stack.
• Resource provision, cost management across our GPU fleet.

Qualifications

• Hands‑on experience with real‑time multinode ML serving infrastructure — ML serving framework experience: NVIDIA Dynamo/Triton, vLLM, SGLang, or equivalent.
• Experience with distributed or disaggregated model serving (Tensor Parallel, Pipeline Parallel, or equivalent).
• Strong cloud infrastructure fundamentals: Linux internals, networking, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• IaC experience — Terraform, Packer, or comparable. You should have opinions about how to do this right.
• On‑call is part of the job. You treat production reliability as a shared responsibility.

Experience

• Experience with multinode training (DDP, FSDP, etc.).
• Experience with gRPC or other bidirectional binary streaming protocols.
• Experience with audio streaming and related technologies (WebRTC, WebSockets, etc.).
• Experience with a multilingual monorepo where you pick the best language out of merit more than personal experience.
• Experience with multi‑cloud infrastructures (AWS, GCP, OCI, etc.).
• Comfort with configuration management tooling (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or similar).
• SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering background at a startup.
• Experience at an early‑stage company.

Benefits

• Build the serving infrastructure behind a category‑defining voice AI company from the ground up.
• You will bring in experience that no one else currently has at the company: you can help us set the vision.
• Direct collaboration with the inference, platform, and ML teams — no handoff culture.
• The systems you build determine what experiences our customers can deploy at scale.
• Meaningful equity upside at an early stage.
• High ownership, high standards, low bureaucracy.
• SF / Bay Area.

Culture

• Are outliers
• Cut through the hype to focus on the craft
• Move fast with agency and freedom
• Maintain a growth mindset, finding joy in the struggle
• Do the right things, knowing that it'll lead to making money

If that sounds like you too, you'll be a great fit for Rime!