We are looking for a Senior Inference Engineer to own inference for real-time multimodal conversational AI. This is a full-stack inference role: you will work across the entire path a model takes from research to production — shaping model architecture so it is servable, building the real-time runtime that serves it within hard latency budgets, and building the offline systems that train and reinforce it. You will operate at the boundary of Science and Inference, taking frontier-scale speech and audio models and making them run within real-time latency budgets on production hardware. You will co-design architectures with scientists to make them inference-friendly from inception, own the low-latency streaming serving path, and build the training and reinforcement-learning infrastructure that closes the loop. You will have the compute, data, and runway to solve problems that few teams in the world are positioned to tackle. As a Senior Engineer, you will own a significant area of the inference stack end to end, drive its technical execution, contribute to the team's roadmap, and work closely with scientists and hardware partners to ensure our models run fast enough to feel human in real time — and at a cost that makes them viable at scale. You may go deep in one of the areas below while contributing across the others. Key job responsibilities Model Architecture & Inference Co-Design • Partner with research scientists to make model architectures servable from inception — surfacing the latency, memory, and cost implications of architecture choices before they are locked in • Implement and optimize the inference path for large-scale multimodal models — attention and KV-cache mechanisms, multimodal/autoregressive decoding, and the compute primitives on the critical path Apply efficiency techniques across the stack — quantization (per-tensor/per-channel/per- group, INT8/FP8/BF16), speculative decoding, operator fusion, and paged KV-cache — and quantify their quality/latency trade-offs • Develop and tune high-performance kernels for critical operations where off-the-shelf implementations leave performance on the table, integrating them into production serving with minimal overhead • Profile end-to-end performance with tools such as Nsight Compute/Systems and roofline analysis to identify and eliminate bottlenecks in large-scale inference workloads Real-Time & Interactive Runtime • Own the real-time serving path for streaming multimodal conversational AI, meeting sub- second, streaming latency budgets under concurrent session load • Build and tune continuous batching, scheduling, and preemption to balance throughput against per-request latency SLAs for interactive workloads • Customize production serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, PyTorch) for real-time streaming generative models that fall outside standard LLM serving patterns — sustained low-latency output under concurrent session load • Implement multi-GPU inference (tensor parallelism, collective communication) for latency- critical paths, and drive cost toward parity with existing production baselines • Establish latency, throughput, and cost benchmarking, and publish the operational metrics that gate deployment Offline Systems: Training, RL & Evaluation Infrastructure • Build and scale the offline inference systems behind post-training — high-throughput rollout generation and reward-model serving for reinforcement learning (RL/RLHF/RLAIF) • Ensure train/serve consistency — that the inference path used in RL and evaluation faithfully matches production online behavior (e.g., parity across sampling and logit processing) • Work with the evaluation team to enable offline inference that captures the quality dimensions unique to real-time conversation — latency sensitivity, audio quality, and interaction naturalness
