--- title: 'Member of Technical Staff, Inference at Inferact' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-inference-inferact-remote-ezb6x9bq2fty' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-08' --- # Member of Technical Staff, Inference at Inferact - **Company:** Inferact - **Location:** Remote - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-09-04 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inferact/ef7198da-ad0a-4c02-963f-6250a15e3534 ## 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 inference runtime engineer to push the boundaries of what's possible in LLM and diffusion model serving. Models grow larger. Architectures shift: mixture-of-experts, multimodal, agentic. Every breakthrough demands innovations on the inference engine itself. You'll work at the core of vLLM, optimizing how models execute across diverse hardware and architectures. Your work will directly impact how the world runs AI inference. ## SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS Minimum qualifications: - Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar. - Deep understanding of transformer architectures and their variants. - Strong programming skills in Python with experience in PyTorch internals. - Experience with LLM inference systems (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang, TGI). - Ability to read and implement model architectures and inference techniques from research papers. - Demonstrate the ability to contribute performant and maintainable code and debug in complex ML codebases. Preferred qualifications: - Deep understanding of KV-cache memory management, prefix caching, and hybrid model serving. - Familiarity with RL frameworks and algorithms for LLMs. - Experience with multimodal inference (audio/image/video/text). - Contributions to open-source ML or system infrastructure projects. Bonus points if you have: - Implemented core features in vLLM or other inference engine projects. - Contributed to vLLM integrations (verl, OpenRLHF, Unsloth, LlamaFactory, etc). - Written widely-shared technical blogs or side projects on vLLM or LLM inference. ## 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. ## 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. 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