---
title: 'Senior Backend Engineer, Inference Platform at Together AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-inference-platform-together-ai-san-francisco-sc7akqq1hv16'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-16'
---

# Senior Backend Engineer, Inference Platform at Together AI

- **Company:** Together AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Posted:** 2025-08-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/togetherai/jobs/4835763007

## Job description

## About the Role

Together AI is building the Inference Platform that brings the most advanced generative AI models to the world. Our platform powers multi-tenant serverless workloads and dedicated endpoints, enabling developers, enterprises, and researchers to harness the latest LLMs, multimodal models, image, audio, video, and speech models at scale.

If you get a thrill from optimizing latency down to the last millisecond, this is your playground. You’ll work hands-on with tens of thousands of GPUs (H100s, H200s, GB200s, and beyond), figuring out how to fully utilize every FLOP and every gigabyte of memory.

You’ll collaborate directly with research teams to bring frontier models into production, making breakthroughs usable in the real world. Our team also works closely with the open source community, contributing to and leveraging projects like SGLang, vLLM, and NVIDIA Dynamo to push the boundaries of inference performance and efficiency.

- Shape the core inference backbone that powers Together AI’s frontier models.
- Solve performance-critical challenges in global request routing, load balancing, and large-scale resource allocation.
- Work with state-of-the-art accelerators (H100s, H200s, GB200s) at global scale.
- Partner with world-class researchers to bring new model architectures into production.
- Collaborate with and contribute to the open source community, shaping the tools that advance the industry.
- A culture of deep technical ownership and high impact — where your work makes models faster, cheaper, and more accessible.
- Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits.

## Responsibilities

- Build and optimize global and local request routing, ensuring low-latency load balancing across data centers and model engine pods.
- Develop auto-scaling systems to dynamically allocate resources and meet strict SLOs across dozens of data centers.
- Design systems for multi-tenant traffic shaping, tuning both resource allocation and request handling — including smart rate limiting and regulation — to ensure fairness and consistent experience across all users.
- Engineer trade-offs between latency and throughput to serve diverse workloads efficiently.
- Optimize prefix caching to reduce model compute and speed up responses.
- Collaborate with ML researchers to bring new model architectures into production at scale.
- Continuously profile and analyze system-level performance to identify bottlenecks and implement optimizations.

## Requirements

- 5+ years of demonstrated experience building large-scale, fault-tolerant, distributed systems and API microservices.
- Strong background in designing, analyzing, and improving efficiency, scalability, and stability of complex systems.
- Excellent understanding of low-level OS concepts: multi-threading, memory management, networking, and storage performance.
- Expert-level programming in one or more of: Rust, Go, Python, or TypeScript.
- Knowledge of modern LLMs and generative models and how they are served in production is a plus.
- Experience working with the open source ecosystem around inference is highly valuable; familiarity with SGLang, vLLM, or NVIDIA Dynamo will be especially handy.
- Experience with Kubernetes or container orchestration is a strong plus.
- Familiarity with GPU software stacks (CUDA, Triton, NCCL) and HPC technologies (InfiniBand, NVLink, MPI) is a plus.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

## About Together AI

Together AI, the AI Native Cloud, is purpose-built for AI engineers. AI application developers get high-performance inference that scales reliably, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for creating frontier-level specialized models, and pre-training at massive scale for fully custom intelligence, all around a marketplace of leading open models that teams can run, adapt, and own. Trusted by Cursor, Decagon, ElevenLabs, Salesforce, and Zoom, Together serves 400+ trillion tokens a month.

## Compensation

We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance and other competitive benefits. The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $200,000 - $290,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.

## Equal Opportunity

Together AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and more.

Please see our privacy policy at https://www.together.ai/privacy

## About Together AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Together AI is the AI Native Cloud, a full-stack platform for production AI that provides inference, fine-tuning, and GPU compute powered by cutting-edge systems research.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Vipul Ved Prakash (CEO), Ce Zhang (CTO), Tri Dao (Chief Scientist), Chris Ré, Percy Liang

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI Infrastructure / Cloud Computing
- **Target customers**: B2B – AI-native startups (e.g., Cursor, Decagon, Eleven Labs), enterprise SaaS (Salesforce, Zoom, Zomato), and AI researchers.
- **Mission**: “Significantly lower the cost of modern AI systems by co-designing software, hardware, algorithms, and models” — with a commitment to open and transparent AI development.

## Products & Services
- **Serverless Inference**: Fast on-demand inference for open-source models with no infrastructure management.
- **Batch Inference**: Asynchronous processing of massive workloads (up to 30B tokens per model) at reduced cost.
- **Dedicated Model Inference**: Deploy models on dedicated GPU infrastructure for speed and control.
- **Dedicated Container Inference**: GPU infrastructure optimized for generative media (video, audio, image).
- **Fine-Tuning**: Fine-tune open-source models using latest research techniques (improves accuracy, reduces hallucinations).
- **Accelerated Compute**: Self-serve instant clusters to thousands of GPUs, optimized with Together Kernel Collection.
- **Model Shaping**: Tools to accelerate inference, model shaping, and pre-training.
- **Managed Storage**: High-performance object storage and parallel filesystems with zero egress fees.
- **Sandbox**: Fast, secure code sandboxes for AI app/agent development environments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed; recent Series C reportedly doubled valuation (amount undisclosed) [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/together-4)
- **Key Metric**: **Total Funding** – $1.334B (including $800M Series C announced in mid-2026) [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/together-4)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Kleiner Perkins, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures (Aramco), and 29+ others across rounds.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Headcount grew 91% YoY to ~280 employees [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/togethercomputer)
  - Acquired CodeSandbox (Dec 2024) and Refuel.AI (May 2025)
  - Customers include Cursor, Decagon, Eleven Labs, AI21, Hedra, Cartesia, Salesforce, Zoom, Zomato
  - Published nine papers at ICML 2026; open-sourced ParallelKernelBench

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack AI platform** covering inference, fine-tuning, compute, storage, and sandboxes — all integrated.
- **World-class research team** co-designing algorithms, kernels, and hardware (e.g., Tri Dao, co-inventor of FlashAttention).
- **Open-source commitment** and contributions (models, datasets, research) build developer trust and ecosystem lock-in.
- **Cost performance**: Claims 2x faster inference and 60% lower cost vs. alternatives through research-driven optimizations.

## Strategic Focus
- Accelerate the shift to open-source AI by making it economically viable at scale.
- Continue investing in systems research (GPU programming, kernel optimization, model shaping) to improve performance and cost.
- Expand enterprise adoption through dedicated deployments and partnerships.
- Grow the platform’s capabilities (e.g., managed storage, sandboxes) to reduce friction for AI-native builders.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values include “Do more with less,” “Open and responsible development,” “Empower innovation,” and “Optimizers” — a research-driven, mission-oriented environment.
- **Remote/Hybrid/Office**: Primarily office-based in San Francisco (251 Rhode Island Street) with employees across 16 countries. Office perks include lunch, dinner, snacks, parking/transit stipends, and relocation support.
- **Benefits**: Competitive salary and equity, 401K matching, health/dental/vision insurance, flexible PTO, generous parental leave, life and disability protection.
- **Engineering Culture**: Deep focus on systems research and open-source; engineers work alongside leading AI researchers (e.g., Tri Dao, Ce Zhang). Talent sourced from Apple, Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Stanford AI Lab.
- **Career Growth**: 53 active job postings (as of mid-2026); roles span ML engineering, platform engineering, research, and go-to-market. High growth trajectory offers rapid advancement.

## Sources
1. [together.ai/about-us](https://www.together.ai/about-us)
2. [together.ai/](https://www.together.ai/)
3. [together.ai/careers](https://www.together.ai/careers)
4. [linkedin.com/company/togethercomputer](https://www.linkedin.com/company/togethercomputer)
5. [cbinsights.com/company/together-4](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/together-4)

## Other roles at Together AI

- [Staff Software Engineer - AI Compute, Together Cloud](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-ai-compute-together-cloud-together-ai-amsterdam-nv5hy62cgmav) — Amsterdam, Netherlands
- [Technical Sourcer - Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-sourcer-engineering-together-ai-san-francisco-pa1pq0f550v9) — San Francisco, CA
- [Hardware Security Engineer, New Grad (2027)](https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-security-engineer-new-grad-2027-together-ai-san-francisco-s419smrdayz5) — San Francisco, CA
- [Hardware Security Engineer Intern (Summer 2027)](https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-security-engineer-intern-summer-2027-together-ai-san-francisco-qq061fbx42jz) — San Francisco, CA
- [Director of Investor Relations](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-investor-relations-together-ai-san-francisco-d0fhjhq6dd9r) — San Francisco, CA
- [Sr. Partnerships Manager, US Model Labs](https://feeny.ai/job/sr-partnerships-manager-us-model-labs-together-ai-san-francisco-mja31t2wy73a) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Partner Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-partner-marketing-manager-together-ai-san-francisco-5bmgss4dft33) — San Francisco, CA
- [Field Marketing & Community Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/field-marketing-community-manager-together-ai-san-francisco-rn8r0fpna794) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Recruiter, GTM & Business](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-recruiter-gtm-business-together-ai-san-francisco-wp8ngndvhfdy) — San Francisco, CA
- [Staff Software Engineer - AI Compute, Together Cloud](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-ai-compute-together-cloud-together-ai-san-francisco-egf3h6r021mj) — San Francisco, CA