Staff Engineer – High-Performance Model Inference

Pantera Capital; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 440,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical coverage

Vision coverage

Dental coverage

401(k)

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Employee discounts

Job summary

xAI is building the high-performance inference platform that serves Grok to millions of users every day with lightning speed and perfect reliability.

As a Member of Technical Staff - Inference, you will design and optimize large-scale model serving systems end-to-end, owning everything from distributed infrastructure (global KV cache, continuous batching, load balancing, auto-scaling) to deep low-level optimizations (GPU kernels, quantization, speculative decoding, tail latency).

Qualifications

• Deep low-level systems programming in C/C++ or Rust.
• Experience with large-scale, high-concurrency production serving.
• Experience with GPU inference engines (vLLM, SGLang, Triton, TensorRT-LLM, etc.).
• Strong background in system optimizations: batching, caching, load balancing, parallelism.
• Low-level inference optimizations: GPU kernels, code generation.
• Algorithmic inference optimizations: quantization, speculative decoding, distillation, low-precision numerics.
• Experience with testing, benchmarking, and reliability of inference services.
• Experience designing and implementing CI/CD infrastructure for inference.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement scalable distributed infrastructure for model serving (load balancing, auto-scaling, batch scheduling, global KV cache).
• Optimize latency and throughput of model inference under real production workloads.
• Build reliable, high-concurrency serving systems that serve billions of users with 100% uptime, 0% error rate, and excellent tail latency.
• Benchmark, fine-tune, and accelerate inference engines (including low-level GPU kernel work and code generation).
• Develop custom tools to trace, replay, and fix issues across the full stack — from orchestration down to GPU kernels.
• Create robust CI/CD infrastructure for seamless endpoint deployment, image publishing, and inference engine updates.
• Accelerate research on scaling test-time compute, RL rollout, and model-hardware co-design for next-generation systems.

Skills

Low-level systems

Large-scale serving

GPU inference engines

System optimizations

GPU kernels

Quantization

Speculative decoding

Testing & benchmarking

CI/CD for inference

Job description

xAI is building the high-performance inference platform that serves Grok to millions of users every day with lightning speed and perfect reliability.

As a Member of Technical Staff - Inference, you will design and optimize large-scale model serving systems end-to-end, owning everything from distributed infrastructure (global KV cache, continuous batching, load balancing, auto-scaling) to deep low-level optimizations (GPU kernels, quantization, speculative decoding, tail latency).