Member of Technical Staff, Cloud Orchestration (Remote) at Inferact (Remote)

Inferact· $200k–$400k·4d ago

Role details

Salary

$200k–$400k

Work type

Remote

Employment

Full-Time

Equity

Yes

Job description

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 cloud orchestration engineer to build the operational backbone that keeps vLLM running reliably at massive scale. You'll design the systems for cluster management, deployment automation, and production monitoring that enable teams worldwide to serve AI models without friction. You'll ensure that vLLM deployments are observable, debuggable, and recoverable, turning operational complexity into infrastructure that just works.

SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS

Minimum qualifications:

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar.
Strong experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale.
Experience designing and implementing custom Kubernetes operators.
Proficiency in Python/Rust/Go and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Helm, etc).
Experience managing GPU clusters and debugging hardware issues.
Ability to work across cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and on-premise infrastructure.

Preferred qualifications:

Experience with ML-specific orchestration tools (Ray, Slurm).
Knowledge of GPU scheduling, multi-tenancy, and resource optimization.
Familiarity with vLLM deployment patterns and configuration.
Track record of improving operational reliability for ML systems.

Bonus points if you have:

Experience deploying inference systems on large-scale GPU (1,000+) clusters.

LOGISTICS

Location: Fully remote, worldwide. We're timezone-flexible but expect regular overlap with Pacific Time for critical syncs.
Compensation: We offer competitive compensations (salary + equity) compared to the local market conditions.
Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas on a case-by-case basis.
Benefits: Inferact offers competitive benefits appropriate to your location, including health coverage where applicable.

Why work at Inferact

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.

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.

Sources

Job description

ABOUT THE ROLE

SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS

LOGISTICS

Why work at Inferact

Application questions