---
title: 'Engineering Manager at Inferact'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-inferact-san-francisco-6kdpq13rx4ny'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-20'
---

# Engineering Manager at Inferact

- **Company:** Inferact
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-20
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inferact/98837c38-33a9-4085-97e7-1974dcf234a1

## Job description

## Overview

Inferact's mission is to grow vLLM as the world's AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster. Founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, we sit at the intersection of models and hardware, a position that took years to build.

## About the Role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to help scale a world-class, senior-heavy engineering organization working at the frontier of AI inference. You will lead a team of exceptional engineers across areas such as inference systems, performance, kernels, accelerators, and cloud infrastructure while creating the management capacity required for Inferact to keep growing quickly without sacrificing technical quality or execution speed. This is a deeply technical management role. You will own team execution, hiring, coaching, prioritization, and operating rhythm, while staying close enough to the work to earn the trust of engineers solving hard systems problems. You will partner closely with engineering and company leadership to turn company priorities into clear technical direction, remove blockers, improve how the team works, and help every engineer do the highest-leverage work of their career.

## Skills and Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar.
- Demonstrated experience managing strong software engineers in technically demanding systems, infrastructure, ML systems, distributed systems, or performance-oriented environments.
- Strong technical credibility with the ability to understand architecture, ask useful questions, challenge assumptions, and help unblock senior engineers without becoming a bottleneck or overriding domain experts.
- Experience owning the full people-management lifecycle, including hiring, onboarding, 1:1s, feedback, performance management, career development, team health, and retention.
- Ability to translate ambiguous company priorities into clear team goals, sequencing, ownership, and execution plans while maintaining urgency in a fast-changing startup environment.
- Track record of building effective engineering operating rhythms around planning, decision-making, technical reviews, cross-team coordination, and accountability without creating unnecessary process.
- Strong judgment about when to dive into a technical problem, when to delegate, and how to create leverage for senior engineers rather than competing with them for ownership.
- 2+ years of management experience with 10+ reports.

Preferred qualifications:

- Experience leading teams working on AI / ML infrastructure, model serving, distributed systems, GPU infrastructure, compilers, performance engineering, cloud infrastructure, or developer platforms.
- Experience managing senior, staff, principal, research-adjacent, or PhD engineers in an environment where technical credibility and autonomy are especially important.
- Experience scaling an engineering team through rapid hiring, including interviewer calibration, hiring decisions, onboarding systems, and thoughtful team design.
- Familiarity with inference systems and adjacent technologies such as vLLM, SGLang, PyTorch, CUDA / Triton, Kubernetes, distributed serving, or accelerator infrastructure.
- Experience partnering closely with founders or engineering executives in an early-stage company where priorities, team boundaries, and organizational needs evolve quickly.

Bonus points if you have:

- Built or scaled a small, unusually high-talent engineering team where the technical surface area was specialized and the quality bar was extremely high.
- Previously remained hands-on as an engineer or technical lead before moving into management and can still reason credibly about complex production systems.
- Managed teams spanning multiple technical specialties, geographies, or time zones while preserving strong ownership and communication.
- Helped establish engineering management practices from an early stage rather than inheriting a mature management system.
- Contributed to open-source infrastructure, AI systems, developer tools, or technically ambitious products used by external engineers.

Logistics

- Location: This role is based in San Francisco, California and is in-office.
- Compensation: Depending on background, skills, and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $200,000 - $400,000 USD + equity.
- Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas on a case-by-case basis.
- Benefits: Inferact offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits as well as 401(k) company match.

## About Inferact

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Inferact is a startup founded by the creators of vLLM, the leading open-source LLM inference engine, dedicated to making AI inference cheaper and faster at global scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; raised $150M in seed funding)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (with a second office in Singapore)
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Simon Mo (CEO), Woosuk Kwon, Kaichao You (Chief Scientist), Roger Wang, Joseph Gonzalez, Ion Stoica

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI infrastructure / open-source inference engine for large language models
- **Target customers**: AI labs, hyperscalers, startups, and enterprises deploying large-scale AI models (B2B, primarily technical teams)
- **Mission**: Grow vLLM as the world’s AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster.

## Products & Services
- **vLLM (Open-Source Inference Engine)**: The core product – an open-source LLM inference engine that supports 500+ model architectures and runs on 200+ accelerator types. Inferact stewards and supercharges vLLM, with all optimizations flowing back to the community.
- **Managed Inference Infrastructure (in development)**: Inferact is building infrastructure to absorb the complexity of deploying frontier models at scale, aiming to make it as simple as spinning up a serverless database.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $150M (seed round, announced 2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lightspeed Venture Partners (lead), Redpoint Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter Capital, Sequoia Capital, The House Fund, GC&H Investments, and others. Partnerships include NVIDIA, Red Hat, DigitalOcean, and Cohere.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - $150M seed round – one of the largest seed rounds in AI infrastructure.
  - 22 employees with +27.3% monthly headcount growth.
  - vLLM ecosystem: 2,000+ contributors, 500+ model architectures, 200+ accelerator types.
  - Day-zero support for new model architectures (e.g., Cohere’s Command A+) and hardware integrations.
  - Active hiring with 5 open positions across inference, performance, kernel engineering, and cloud orchestration.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep ecosystem moat**: vLLM is the de facto standard open-source inference engine, with a massive community and integrations across models and hardware that took years to build.
- **Founding team credibility**: Creators and core maintainers of vLLM, with experience deploying at frontier scale (research and production).
- **Hardware-software co-optimization**: Positioned at the intersection of model innovation and hardware diversity, enabling day-zero compatibility and performance optimizations.
- **Open-source commitment**: All improvements flow back to vLLM, ensuring community trust and rapid adoption.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Push vLLM performance further, deepen support for emerging model architectures (MoE, multimodal, agentic), expand hardware coverage (200+ accelerators), and build managed infrastructure to simplify deployment.
- **Growth direction**: Close the capability gap between models and serving systems; absorb complexity so teams can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: High-caliber engineering team with roots in vLLM, PyTorch, and top AI labs. Emphasis on open-source contribution and cutting-edge inference research.
- **Work policy**: Hybrid with a San Francisco HQ; at least one open role (Member of Technical Staff, Exceptional Generalist) is listed as Remote.
- **Notable perks**: Opportunity to work at the frontier of AI inference, directly impact the open-source ecosystem, and collaborate with partners like NVIDIA, Red Hat, and major AI labs.
- **Engineering culture**: Strong focus on systems engineering, kernel optimization, and cloud orchestration – ideal for engineers passionate about performance and infrastructure.

## Sources
1. [inferact.ai](https://inferact.ai/)
2. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/inferact)
3. [CB Insights](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/inferact)
4. [Sequoia Capital](https://sequoiacap.com/companies/inferact/)
5. [Ashby Jobs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inferact)

## Other roles at Inferact

- [Strategic Finance Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-finance-lead-inferact-san-francisco-8w870avftckq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Controller](https://feeny.ai/job/controller-inferact-san-francisco-8ccr4mehhhdv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, Vulnerability Management](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-vulnerability-management-inferact-san-francisco-28n91fzms5pv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-forward-deployed-engineer-inferact-san-francisco-a1wq0bc1fbfk) — San Francisco, CA
- [Enterprise Partnerships Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-partnerships-manager-inferact-san-francisco-56fh7h15hft3) — San Francisco, CA
- [GTM Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-engineer-inferact-san-francisco-4kw95nqkxq2p) — San Francisco, CA
- [Graphic Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/graphic-designer-inferact-san-francisco-vrkzf7acr3fg) — San Francisco, CA
- [Social Media Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/social-media-manager-inferact-san-francisco-8265d2aybdpm) — San Francisco, CA
- [Technical Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-product-marketing-manager-inferact-san-francisco-ts8bahbsbvv7) — San Francisco, CA
- [Field Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/field-marketing-manager-inferact-san-francisco-ve91k1kbsy1y) — San Francisco, CA