Software Engineer - Model Performance Systems

Baseten; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical/dental/vision for US employees

Flexible PTO including winter break

Job summary

Baseten in San Francisco is seeking software engineers at the intersection of high-performance computing and large language model engineering. You will define the roadmap, drive key technical decisions, and take full ownership of the future of our model-inference tooling.

Join a small team building GPU-optimized development environments, open-source tools, and real-time dashboards to push the boundaries of AI infrastructure. This mid-senior role rewards ownership and cross-team collaboration.

Qualifications

• Love for systems & hardware and GPU memory subsystems knowledge.
• Automation mindset with stress-testing and fuzzy testing.
• Curiosity about Transformers math and FLOPs/memory implications.
• Proficiency with Python and NVIDIA software stack; C++ familiarity helps.

Responsibilities

• Benchmark LLM quality benchmarks (GSM8K, MMLU) and custom performance suites.
• Develop GPU-enabled development environments (like Codespaces) for model experimentation.
• Build/open-source tools to automate model evaluation and benchmarking (e.g., InferenceMAX, genai-bench).
• Use profilers to collect performance profiles and debug compute/networking stacks.
• Create real-time dashboards and alerts for system health and startup times.
• Automate CI/CD performance testing and release workflows for model runtimes.
• Identify Pareto frontier configurations for latency, cost and quality.

Skills

Systems & Hardware

Automation Mindset

Mathematical Curiosity

Technical Toolkit

Tools

Python

NVIDIA software stack

C++ familiarity

Job description

ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

THE ROLE

We are looking for Software Engineers to join our team. This is a specialized, high-impact role sitting at the intersection of high-performance computing (HPC) and Large Language Model (LLM) engineering. You will not just be building the automated "speedometer and diagnostic" suite for our next-generation AI infrastructure; you will be defining the roadmap, driving key technical decisions, and taking full ownership of the future of this work.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Benchmarking: Evaluate, run and automate standard LLM quality benchmarks (GSM8K, MMLU) alongside custom performance suites for specific workloads (e.g., long-context window, KV cache reuse, disaggregated serving).

• DevEx Improvement: Develop and maintain internal GPU-enabled development environments (similar to GitHub Codespaces). You will ensure the team has seamless, high-performance "dev machines" optimized for model experimentation.

• Tool Development: Build and contribute to open-source tools such as InferenceMAX and genai-bench to automate model evaluation, benchmarking and analysis.

• System Profiling: Use profilers like PyTorch Profiler, NVIDIA Nsight Systems and py-spy to collect performance profiles, identify bottlenecks, and debug the compute/networking stack.

• Monitoring & Observability: Develop real-time dashboards and alerts to monitor system health, model startup times, and runtime performance.

• Continuous Integration: Automate performance testing via CI/CD pipelines to catch regressions and build release workflow automation for the model runtimes stack.

• Optimization Automation: Build tools to find the "Pareto frontier"—identifying the absolute best configuration (latency vs. cost vs. quality) for a given model and workload.

REQUIREMENTS

This is a mid-senior, high leverage role. We care about your technical depth, strong communication skills to drive cross-team efforts, ability to navigate vague requirements and mentor other engineers. We want to talk to you if you have:

• A Love for Systems & Hardware: You aren’t just interested in the AI; you want to understand GPU memory subsystems, InfiniBand, and how data moves across a cluster.

• An Automation Mindset: You believe that if a task has to be done twice, it should be scripted. You have a passion for stress-testing and fuzzy testing to find the "breaking point" of a system.

• Mathematical Curiosity: A desire to understand the underlying math of Transformers and how it translates into FLOPs and memory requirements.

• Technical Toolkit: Familiarity with Python, and an eagerness to master the NVIDIA software stack. C++ familiarity is good to have.

WHY THIS ROLE

• Direct Impact: Your tools will be the gatekeeper for what defines "good" performance for our customers.

• Deep Learning (Literally): You will gain world-class expertise in GPU orchestration and LLM inference that few engineers in the industry possess.

• High Ownership: As the lead of a small team, you will have the autonomy to build tools from scratch and contribute to open-source projects.

BENEFITS

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity

• (U.S. only) 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents

• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)

• Paid parental leave

• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot

• (U.S. only) Company-facilitated 401(k)

• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).