Software Engineer - Model Performance Systems

Baseten; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 165,000 - 330,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation & equity

US medical/dental/vision insurance for

flexible PTO including Winter Break

Paid parental leave

Fertility and family-building stipend

401(k)

Job summary

Baseten is seeking software engineers to join our HPC/LLM-focused team. You will shape the roadmap, drive key technical decisions, and own critical infrastructure that powers next-generation AI models in production.

This mid-senior role blends systems, hardware awareness, and automation. You will build high-performance dev environments, contribute to open-source tools like InferenceMAX and genai-bench, and mentor other engineers while shipping reliable, scalable software.

Qualifications

• Mid-senior level with high impact responsibilities.
• Strong communication and cross-team collaboration.
• Ability to mentor other engineers.
• Experience with GPUs and HPC concepts.

Responsibilities

• Benchmark LLM quality and performance benchmarks (GSM8K, MMLU) and workload-specific tests.
• Develop and maintain GPU-enabled development environments like Codespaces.
• Build and contribute to open-source tools to automate model evaluation and benchmarking.
• Use profilers to collect performance profiles and debug compute/networking stacks.
• Develop real-time dashboards and alerts for system health and runtime performance.
• Automate CI/CD performance testing and release workflow for model runtimes.
• Identify Pareto-optimal configurations for latency, cost, and quality.

Skills

Systems & hardware

Automation mindset

Mathematical curiosity

Python

C++

NVIDIA software stack

Tools

GitHub Codespaces

InferenceMAX

genai-bench

PyTorch Profiler

NVIDIA Nsight Systems

py-spy

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.

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).

Compensation Range: $165K - $330K