---
title: 'HR / People Lead at Inferact'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/hr-people-lead-inferact-san-francisco-qc5yjw670w1d'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-15'
---

# HR / People Lead at Inferact

- **Company:** Inferact
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $180k–$250k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inferact/910f4dbb-29ba-4105-a3e7-076fba07123a

## 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 are looking for an experienced, high-ownership HR / People Lead to own, design, and scale our People Operations and HR infrastructure as we expand. In this key role, you will bridge the critical handoff from talent acquisition to employee onboarding and serve as the core operational owner for the entire employee lifecycle. You will work directly with leadership, finance, and engineering teams to manage HR operations end-to-end—spanning onboarding workflows, employee relations, payroll, benefits, compliance, and immigration/visa filings. The ideal candidate brings a blend of strategic HR experience from scaling tech companies and the scrappy, hands-on execution needed in an early-stage startup environment.

## Skills and Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
- 4+ years of experience as an HR Business Partner, People Specialist, or People Operations lead in fast-paced tech environments.
- Proven hands-on experience managing core HR infrastructure: onboarding, payroll, benefits, employee relations, and compliance.
- Direct experience utilizing modern startup tools and platforms, including PEO, payroll, benefits, ATS, etc.
- Experience managing immigration and visa workflows in coordination with external legal counsel.
- Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills, with a track record of building trust across founders, employees, and external vendors.

Preferred qualifications:

- Experience spanning both high-growth startups and established tech companies.
- Demonstrated ability to operate as a sole IC or strategic lead in a fast-moving 0-to-1 environment.
- Familiarity with cross-border HR logistics, international PEO structures, or working with APAC HR partners.

Logistics

- Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site / Hybrid).
- Compensation: $180,000 – $250,000 base salary based on experience and background, plus meaningful startup equity.
- Benefits: Generous health, dental, and vision insurance coverage, alongside a 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

- [Founding Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-product-designer-inferact-san-francisco-8fhyc666jrb6) — San Francisco, CA
- [IT Support & Operations Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/it-support-operations-engineer-inferact-san-francisco-jfknsmecptdj) — San Francisco, CA
- [Inference Engineering, Co-op](https://feeny.ai/job/inference-engineering-co-op-inferact-san-francisco-zxysczbanr0y) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Legal](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-legal-inferact-san-francisco-8za70prrkyas) — San Francisco, CA
- [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