---
title: 'Software Engineer, Inference at Luma'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-inference-luma-sf-bay-area-9qwckat058wp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Software Engineer, Inference at Luma

- **Company:** Luma
- **Location:** Sf Bay Area, CA
- **Compensation:** $188k–$395k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-01-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/lumalabs-ai/am9icG9zdDo8-N5tRXErv9eJJp_TyVo8

## Job description

## About Luma AI

Luma's mission is to build multimodal AI to expand human imagination and capabilities. We believe that multimodality is critical for intelligence. To go beyond language models and build more aware, capable and useful systems, the next step function change will come from vision. So we are working on training and scaling up multimodal foundation models for systems that can see and understand, show and explain, and eventually interact with our world to effect change.

Luma’s mission is to build multimodal AI to expand human imagination and capabilities. We believe that multimodality is critical for intelligence. To go beyond language models and build more aware, capable and useful systems, the next step function change will come from vision. We are working on training and scaling up multimodal foundation models for systems that can see and understand, show and explain, and eventually interact with our world to affect change. We know we are not going to reach our goal with reliable & scalable infrastructure, which is going to become the differentiating factor between success and failure.

## Role & Responsibilities

- Ship new model architectures by integrating them into our inference engine
- Collaborate closely across research, engineering and infrastructure to streamline and optimize model efficiency and deployments
- Build internal tooling to measure, profile, and track the lifetime of inference jobs and workflows
- Automate, test and maintain our inference services to ensure maximum uptime and reliability
- Optimize deployment workflows to scale across thousands of machines
- Manage and optimize our inference workloads across different clusters & hardware providers
- Build sophisticated scheduling systems to optimally leverage our expensive GPU resources while meeting internal SLOs
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for processing/optimizing model checkpoints, platform components, and SDKs for internal teams to integrate into our products/internal tooling

Background

- Strong Python and system architecture skills
- Experience with model deployment using PyTorch, Huggingface, vLLM, SGLang, tensorRT-LLM, or similar
- Experience with queues, scheduling, traffic-control, fleet management at scale
- Experience with Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes
- Bonus points: - Experience with modern networking stacks, including RDMA (RoCE, Infiniband, NVLink)
- Experience with high performance large scale ML systems (>100 GPUs)
- Experience with FFmpeg and multimedia processing

Example Projects

- Create a resilient artifact store that manages all checkpoints across multiple versions of multiple models
- Enable hotswapping of models for our GPU workers based on live traffic patterns
- Build a robust queueing system for our jobs that take into account cluster availability and user priority
- Architect a e2e model serving deployment pipeline for a custom vendor
- Integrate our inference stack into an online reinforcement learning pipeline
- Regression & precision testing across different hardware platforms
- Building a full tracing system to trace the end-to-end lifetime of any inference workload

Tech stack Must have

- Python
- Redis
- S3-compatible Storage
- Model serving (one of: PyTorch, vLLM, SGLang, Huggingface)
- Understanding of large-scale orchestration, deployment, scheduling (via Kubernetes or similar)

## Nice to have

- CUDA
- FFmpeg

## About Luma

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Luma builds multimodal AI models that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world, shipping them in products like Dream Machine for creators and teams.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: Redwood City, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Not publicly listed on official sources

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Generative AI / Creative AI
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises, agencies, developers) and B2C (creators, filmmakers)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world.

## Products & Services
- **Luma Dream Machine**: Consumer-facing product for turning ideas into compelling visuals (video, image, audio, text) using generative AI.
- **Ray 3.2 API**: Production-grade video generation API with full creative control—multi-keyframe (up to 16), V2V up to 20 seconds, reframe, 1080p output, native HDR, and 16-bit EXR export.
- **Uni-1.1 API**: Multimodal reasoning model API for image generation (text-to-image, reference-guided) and natural-language image editing, with up to nine reference inputs per request.
- **Luma Agents**: Agentic creative workflows that plan, generate, iterate, and refine across every stage of creative work—available in the Luma App and trusted by teams at Publicis Groupe, Serviceplan, Mazda, Dentsu, and Humain.
- **Open Physical AI Lab**: An open science effort to solve generalization in physical AI, built in the open for the benefit of all humanity.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metrics**: Total Funding: $1.3B+ (official site) / $1.057B (LinkedIn); Annual Revenue: $5M (LinkedIn estimate); Users worldwide: 30M+; Team Members: 250+
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: HUMAIN (led Series C), Andreessen Horowitz (led Series B), Amplify Partners (led Series A), Matrix (led Seed Round). Partners include Envato, Comfy, Runware, Flora, Krea, Magnific, Fal, LovArt.
- **Growth Signals**: 250+ team members, 30M+ users, $1.3B+ total funding, 45% yearly LinkedIn follower growth, recent product launches (Ray3.2, Uni-1.1, Luma Skills, Wonder Project partnership), $900M Series C raised November 2025.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack AI**: Luma builds its own foundation models end-to-end, rather than wrapping third-party models—giving it unique control over quality, latency, and cost.
- **Multimodal reasoning**: Uni-1 understands intention and responds to direction, not just prompts—offering brand intelligence at the model level.
- **Cinematic-grade output**: Ray 3.2 delivers 1080p, native HDR, 16-bit EXR export—production-ready for professional film and advertising pipelines.
- **Open science commitment**: The Open Physical AI Lab publishes research openly, attracting top-tier research talent and fostering community trust.
- **Speed & cost**: Claims less than half the price and latency of comparable models.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling enterprise adoption**: Custom deployment for creative teams at scale across advertising, film, and gaming production pipelines.
- **Agentic workflows**: Building Luma Agents as a force multiplier for creative teams—automating repetitive tasks while maintaining brand consistency.
- **Physical AI research**: Advancing the Open Physical AI Lab to solve generalization in physical AI, bridging digital generation with real-world operation.
- **API ecosystem growth**: Expanding the developer platform with two tiers (Build and Scale) and SDKs for Python and JavaScript/TypeScript.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & mission**: "We believe real-world physics is the path to general intelligence. We unite research, product, and go-to-market into one engine." Described as a "lean, high-achieving team" building the future of creative intelligence.
- **Compensation & benefits**: Competitive compensation, 100% covered medical/dental/vision for employee and family, $1,500/year learning stipend, catered meals, team events, home office setup.
- **Work mode**: On-site roles in Redwood City, CA with additional offices in New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; and international locations (Munich, Paris, London, Berlin).
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on shipping frontier research directly into products—"frontier research ships straight into the hands of working creatives." Hiring across research, systems engineering, infrastructure, design, and product.
- **Hiring process**: Transparent and fast—aims to complete within 2-3 weeks. Application review within a week, then recruiter screen, hiring manager interview, and team/leadership interviews.
- **Employee ratings**: 4.1/5.0 on LinkedIn (9 reviews)—Work-Life: 3.6, Compensation: 4.4, Culture: 4.1, Career: 4.2.
- **Open roles**: 46+ open positions including Forward Deployed Engineer, Research Scientist, Software Engineer, Robotics Engineer, Simulation Researcher, Site Reliability Engineer, Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise Account Executive, and more.

## Sources
1. [lumalabs.ai - Careers](https://lumalabs.ai/careers)
2. [lumalabs.ai - Official Site](https://lumalabs.ai/)
3. [lumalabs.ai - LLM Info](https://lumalabs.ai/llm-info)
4. [LinkedIn - Luma](https://linkedin.com/company/lumalabsai)

## Other roles at Luma

- [Research Scientist / Engineer – Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-engineer-reinforcement-learning-infrastructure-luma-sf-bay-v3kqd6ee41ag) — Sf Bay Area, CA
- [Tech Lead Manager, Inference](https://feeny.ai/job/tech-lead-manager-inference-luma-sf-bay-area-wv3qjs47nghh) — Sf Bay Area, CA
- [Creative Technologist](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-technologist-luma-london-1edm2ph4be1t) — London, United Kingdom
- [Sales Manager - West Coast](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-manager-west-coast-luma-los-angeles-qdhxhg06y85x) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Forward Deployed Engineer (EU)](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-eu-luma-london-h5nr5x8w2bhd) — London, United Kingdom
- [Product Manager, Applied Research](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-applied-research-luma-sf-bay-area-tgmbcragfeqt) — Sf Bay Area, CA
- [Product Manager, Core Product](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-core-product-luma-sf-bay-area-dx7f4b6fnr4d) — Sf Bay Area, CA
- [Social Media Editor](https://feeny.ai/job/social-media-editor-luma-los-angeles-ekyz2de2wh6f) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Senior Video Editor](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-video-editor-luma-los-angeles-1ynx82dj6hbw) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-luma-sf-bay-area-s0n3bqsd0qy1) — Sf Bay Area, CA