---
title: 'Founding Product Designer at Inferact'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-product-designer-inferact-san-francisco-8fhyc666jrb6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Founding Product Designer at Inferact

- **Company:** Inferact
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inferact/f73d3f45-cdea-41a8-8144-acf504aa4fda

## 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 a Founding Product Designer to give Inferact and vLLM a distinct visual identity, sharp brand presence, and highly intuitive developer product experiences. This is a 0-to-1, full-stack design role for a creator with high aesthetic taste, deep technical curiosity, and an AI-native way of executing.

You will bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and visual craft. In your first 90 days, you’ll establish our visual language across high-visibility social assets, model launch campaigns, blog graphics, and partner announcements. As we scale, you’ll transition into shaping our web surfaces, brand identity, internal tooling, and core product interfaces. You’ll work directly with founders, engineering leads, product, and marketing to build design systems that scale across open-source communities, developer tools, and enterprise platforms.

30-60-90 Day Milestones

- 30 Days: Own and ship high-impact design assets for model launches, technical content, and ecosystem news. You’ll onboard to the inference ecosystem by establishing a baseline visual language for Inferact and vLLM.
- 60 Days: Expand into initial UI/UX designs for our production tooling and developer dashboards, while continuing to increase your design footprint across our core website, interactive developer pages, partner announcement assets, and i.
- 90 Days: Own the core design for our enterprise product: focus on core product design—refining UI/UX for developer tools, optimizing developer workflows, and establishing a unified design system from brand assets to product components.

## Skills and Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in Product Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Science, Interactive Media, or a related field.
- A strong portfolio or tech-forward personal website demonstrating exceptional craft, strong typography, layout, visual systems, and interactive UI/UX thinking.
- AI-native operating style, using modern AI image, design, and code generators to explore concepts rapidly and ship production-ready assets.
- High technical taste and fluency, with a track record of designing for developers, technical products, or complex systems.
- End-to-end execution capability—able to take a rough idea or technical blog post and independently produce polished visuals, landing pages, or product mockups without needing prescribed steps.
- Ability to collaborate credibly with technical founders, engineers, and product managers in a fast-paced, high-urgency startup environment.

Preferred qualifications:

- Experience designing for developer tools, AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, open-source communities, or technical SaaS products.
- Strong background in visual design, brand systems, illustration, or graphic assets alongside digital product design (UI/UX).
- Proficiency with modern web design and front-end prototyping tools (Figma, Framer, Webflow, React/Tailwind code prototypes).
- Experience designing graphics and collateral for major developer conferences, community events, and launch campaigns.

Bonus points if you have:

- Motion design skills (After Effects, Rive, Lottie) or lightweight 3D design experience (Blender, Cinema 4D, Spline).
- Built and maintained a personal tech-forward website or creative engineering projects showcasing custom interaction design.
- Created 0-to-1 visual identities or design systems for a high-growth startup or prominent open-source project.

Logistics

Location: This role is based in San Francisco, California. Will consider remote in the US for exceptional candidates.

Compensation: Compensation is to be determined based on background, skills, and experience. Offers include 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

- [Member of Technical Staff, Inference](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-inference-inferact-remote-ezb6x9bq2fty)
- [Member of Technical Staff, Cloud Orchestration (Remote)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-cloud-orchestration-remote-inferact-remote-pzza0bak1bw7)
- [Member of Technical Staff, Cluster Administration](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-cluster-administration-inferact-san-francisco-hzy2pmhsv4ca) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, Site Reliability Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-site-reliability-engineer-inferact-san-francisco-4hdd72zebn0b) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-engineering-inferact-san-francisco-rhcv5bpns37j) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-inferact-san-francisco-ap07axndjdjb) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, AMD GPU Performance Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-amd-gpu-performance-engineering-inferact-san-francisco-q425hfnsdrh2) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, TPU Performance Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-tpu-performance-engineering-inferact-singapore-hsapg2c1ks2d) — Singapore
- [Member of Technical Staff, AMD GPU Performance Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-amd-gpu-performance-engineering-inferact-singapore-q7jn24nd0rbf) — Singapore
- [Member of Technical Staff, Performance and Scale](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-performance-and-scale-inferact-singapore-vyavkymh08h3) — Singapore