Frontend Engineer - Dedicated Inference at Baseten (San Francisco, CA)

Baseten· San Francisco, CA· $190k–$300k·4d ago

Role details

Salary

$190k–$300k

Work type

Hybrid

Employment

Full-Time

Equity

Yes

Skills

ReactTypeScriptWeb DevelopmentUI DesignAPI IntegrationTailwind CSSNext.jsWebSocketsReal-time dataCustom visualization toolingOpen-source contributions

Benefits

Competitive Compensation · Equity · 100% Medical, Dental, And Vision Insurance · Flexible PTO · Company-Wide Winter Break · Paid Parental Leave · Fertility And Family-Building Stipend · 401(K)

Baseten at a glance

AI inference platform for deploying, optimizing, and running machine learning models in production at scale.

Baseten runs trained AI models in production for other companies, handling the GPUs, autoscaling, runtime, and performance tuning so engineering teams get a fast, reliable API without operating the infrastructure themselves. It supports open source, custom, and fine tuned models across managed cloud, hybrid, and self hosted deployments.

$2B+ raised · latest: Series F · $1.5B · June 2026 (valuations of $13B and $11B across two tranches) · backed by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, Spark Capital, Sands Capital

Summary

The Senior Frontend Engineer will craft performant and delightful user experiences for Baseten's core platform, owning critical parts of the web application stack. This role involves collaborating with product, design, and backend teams to launch impactful features that help users deploy and manage AI systems at scale.

Job description

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 baseten.co/, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

THE ROLE

We’re looking for a seasoned Frontend Engineer to craft performant and delightful user experiences across Baseten’s core platform. You’ll own critical parts of our web application stack and collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and backend teams to launch impactful features that help users deploy and manage AI systems at scale.

EXAMPLE INITIATIVES

You'll get to work on these types of projects as part of our Core Product team:

Rolling Deployments baseten.co
Model APIs for frontier models baseten.co/model-apis
Model training built for production inference baseten.co/training

RESPONSIBILITIES

Design, implement, and maintain responsive, accessible, and user-friendly frontend interfaces using React and TypeScript
Collaborate closely with product designers to turn complex ideas into elegant, intuitive UIs
Optimize application performance and reliability, with a focus on rendering speed and responsiveness
Drive major frontend initiatives, including partnering with backend teams to define APIs and test and refine end-to-end flows
Establish best practices, and mentor other engineers on frontend technologies
Build reusable component libraries and frontend infrastructure that accelerate product development
Partner with backend and platform teams to define and refine APIs and end-to-end flows

REQUIREMENTS

5+ years of experience building production-grade web applications
Deep expertise in React, TypeScript, and modern web development tooling
Track record of building well-crafted, performant, and scalable UIs
Strong product intuition and empathy for the user experience
Experience working in cross-functional product teams in a fast-paced environment
Excellent communication and collaboration skills

NICE TO HAVE

Familiarity with Tailwind CSS, Next.js, or other modern frontend frameworks
Background in developer tools or data/ML infrastructure products
Experience with WebSockets, real-time data, or custom visualization tooling
Contributions to open-source projects or public engineering work

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).

Why work at Baseten

Hard Technical Problems: Engineers work on the most challenging problems in modern infrastructure—model serving, low-level GPU optimization, networking, distributed systems, and observability. This is a high-agency, high-impact engineering environment.
High Growth Trajectory: The company is experiencing explosive growth (224% headcount increase, active hiring). This offers significant career acceleration and ownership opportunities.
Strong Engineering Culture: Founded by engineers, for engineers. The culture emphasizes "first-principles thinking across the entire stack" and a "customer-obsessed" mindset. The employer rating on compensation, culture, and work-life balance is rated highly (5.0).
Top-Tier Team & Investors: The team has strong talent density with hires from Meta, Stripe, Google, NVIDIA, and Databricks. Being backed by top-tier VCs provides stability and a clear long-term vision.
Hybrid/In-Office: Based in San Francisco with a strong in-person or hybrid culture common for fast-moving infrastructure startups.

About Baseten

Company Overview

One-liner: Baseten is an AI infrastructure platform that provides high-performance inference infrastructure for deploying, optimizing, and managing AI models in production.
Entity Type: Private (Series F)
Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
Founded: 2019
Founders: Tuhin Srivastava (CEO), Amir Haghighat (CTO), Phil Howes (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist)

Core Business

Primary industry/industries: AI Infrastructure / Cloud Computing / MLOps
Target customers: B2B, targeting AI-native companies, enterprises, and developers building and deploying large-scale AI applications. Notable customers include Abridge, Cursor, Lovable, Notion, and OpenEvidence.
Mission or purpose statement: Provide the tooling, expertise, and hardware needed for teams to bring performant AI products to market as quickly and reliably as possible. The company's core belief is that "inference is everything" and that the future of AI will consist of millions of specialized models embedded into every product and workflow.

Products & Services

Baseten Cloud: A fully-managed, global deployment platform for AI models. Provides out-of-the-box performance optimizations, 99.99% uptime, and massive horizontal scale. Supports single-tenant and self-hosted (hybrid) deployments.
Baseten Inference Stack: The proprietary, underlying technology that powers the platform. Includes custom model runtimes (LLMs, embeddings, voice AI, image generation), advanced caching, custom kernels, and cutting-edge performance research. Claims 2x higher throughput and 10% lower latency for embeddings (BEI).
Baseten Chains: Enables granular hardware and autoscaling for compound AI systems, reportedly powering 6x better GPU usage and cutting latency in half.
Frontier Gateway (Pre-optimized Model APIs): Allows users to instantly test and deploy pre-optimized versions of the latest open-source, custom, and fine-tuned models (e.g., Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM, gpt-oss).
Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE): A service offering where Baseten engineers work side-by-side with key customers to build, optimize, and scale their models from prototype to production.
Training on Baseten: Allows users to train models and deploy them in one click on the inference-optimized infrastructure.
Monetization API: An inference API that allows model developers to monetize their models.

Market Standing

Valuation/Market Cap: Not privately disclosed, but the company has raised a total of $585M in funding.
Key Metric: Annual revenue of $7.0M (as per LinkedIn). Total funding of $585M.
Notable Investors/Partners: IVP, Spark Capital, Bond, CapitalG, South Park Commons, Greylock.
Growth Signals:
- Announced a Series F funding round (details not fully public in search results).
- Massive headcount growth: 224.4% year-over-year, now employing 201 people.
- LinkedIn follower growth: 199.9% year-over-year.
- Active job postings: 112 open roles.
- Acquired the company Parsed.
- Backed by high-profile institutional investors including CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund) and IVP.

Competitive Advantages

High-Performance Inference Stack: A proprietary, deeply optimized stack focusing on ultra-low latency and high throughput for the most demanding Gen AI workloads (voice AI, real-time streaming, complex compound AI systems).
Customer Obsession & Forward Deployed Engineering: A hands-on, consulting-style approach with their FDE team, which builds deep, sticky relationships with high-value customers like Abridge and Notion.
Global & Hybrid Cloud Flexibility: Offers both fully-managed cloud and self-hosted deployments within customer VPCs, providing scalability and security for enterprises with strict data governance requirements.
Founding Team's Deep Technical Credibility: Built by former researchers and engineers who experienced the "deployment hell" of AI systems firsthand, giving them deep empathy and expertise in the problem they are solving.

Strategic Focus

Dominating the "Inference-as-a-Service" Market: The company's core thesis is that inference will become the largest market ever created, and they are building the infrastructure to power it.
Scaling for High-Volume, Mission-Critical Workloads: Focus on reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency for customers who cannot afford downtime or latency (e.g., AI phone calls, real-time translation).
Deepening the Technical Stack: Continuously investing in performance research (custom kernels, new decoding techniques) and expanding capabilities into new areas like voice AI and audio streaming.
Aggressive Hiring: With 112 open positions and massive YoY growth, scaling the engineering, sales, and operations teams is a clear priority.

Sources