Software Engineer- Model Performance Systems

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 OPPORTUNITY

We are looking for early‑career Software Engineers to join our team. This is a specialized role sitting at the intersection of high‑performance computing (HPC) and Large Language Model (LLM) engineering. You will be responsible for building the automated "speedometer and diagnostic" suite for our next‑generation AI infrastructure. In this role, you won’t just be using models; you will be tearing them apart to see how they run on the metal. You will build tools that measure GPU FLOPS, stress‑test InfiniBand clusters, and define the benchmarks that ensure our systems are production‑ready.

Responsibilities

• Performance Benchmarking: Run and automate standard LLM quality benchmarks (GSM8K, MMLU) alongside custom performance suites for specific workloads (e.g., long‑context window, KV cache reuse).
• Infrastructure Validation: Create automated acceptance tests for new GPU clusters across x86 and ARM systems, measuring GPU memory bandwidth, networking throughput, and multi‑node networking performance.
• Model Dev Experience: 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 tools such as InferenceMAX and genai‑bench to automate model evaluation and optimization.
• Deep Hardware Profiling: Use PyTorch Profiler and NVIDIA Nsight Systems to collect performance profiles, identify bottlenecks, and debug the NVIDIA 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 in model setups before they hit production.
• 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.

What We’re Looking For

• 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.
• Interest in Optimization: You are excited to learn about (or already play with) quantization, speculative decoding, disaggregated serving, and kernel‑level optimizations.
• 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 a small team of freshers led by experts, you will have the autonomy to build tools from scratch and contribute to open‑source projects.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• 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.
• Company‑facilitated 401(k).
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

Apply now

To embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward‑thinking team, we would love to hear from you.

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: $160K - $200K