---
title: 'Software Engineer - Model Performance Systems at Baseten'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-model-performance-systems-baseten-san-francisco-pshjd27taa1k'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-20'
---

# Software Engineer - Model Performance Systems at Baseten

- **Company:** [Baseten](https://feeny.ai/companies/baseten)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $165k–$330k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-01-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-20
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten/75d7beac-0298-40fa-b206-2e0c0c08a64f/application

**Skills:** Python, PyTorch, NVIDIA Nsight Systems, PyTorch Profiler, InfiniBand, x86, ARM, CI/CD, GitHub Codespaces, C++, Quantization, Speculative decoding, Disaggregated serving, Kernel-level optimizations

> Build automated speedometer and diagnostic suites for AI infrastructure, focusing on performance benchmarking, infrastructure validation, and model development environments. The role involves deep hardware profiling and optimization automation using Python and NVIDIA tools.

## Job description

## ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our [$1.5B Series F](https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-our-series-f/), led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

## THE ROLE

We are looking for Software Engineers to join our team. This is a specialized, high-impact role sitting at the intersection of high-performance computing (HPC) and Large Language Model (LLM) engineering. You will not just be building the automated "speedometer and diagnostic" suite for our next-generation AI infrastructure; you will be defining the roadmap, driving key technical decisions, and taking full ownership of the future of this work.

## RESPONSIBILITIES

- Benchmarking: Evaluate, run and automate standard LLM quality benchmarks (GSM8K, MMLU) alongside custom performance suites for specific workloads (e.g., long-context window, KV cache reuse, disaggregated serving).
- DevEx Improvement: Develop and maintain internal GPU-enabled development environments (similar to GitHub Codespaces). You will ensure the team has seamless, high-performance "dev machines" optimized for model experimentation.
- Tool Development: Build and contribute to open-source tools such as InferenceMAX and genai-bench to automate model evaluation, benchmarking and analysis.
- System Profiling: Use profilers like PyTorch Profiler, NVIDIA Nsight Systems and py-spy to collect performance profiles, identify bottlenecks, and debug the compute/networking stack.
- Monitoring & Observability: Develop real-time dashboards and alerts to monitor system health, model startup times, and runtime performance.
- Continuous Integration: Automate performance testing via CI/CD pipelines to catch regressions and build release workflow automation for the model runtimes stack.
- Optimization Automation: Build tools to find the "Pareto frontier"—identifying the absolute best configuration (latency vs. cost vs. quality) for a given model and workload.

## REQUIREMENTS

This is a mid-senior, high leverage role. We care about your technical depth, strong communication skills to drive cross-team efforts, ability to navigate vague requirements and mentor other engineers. We want to talk to you if you have:

- A Love for Systems & Hardware: You aren’t just interested in the AI; you want to understand GPU memory subsystems, InfiniBand, and how data moves across a cluster.
- An Automation Mindset: You believe that if a task has to be done twice, it should be scripted. You have a passion for stress-testing and fuzzy testing to find the "breaking point" of a system.
- Mathematical Curiosity: A desire to understand the underlying math of Transformers and how it translates into FLOPs and memory requirements.
- Technical Toolkit: Familiarity with Python, and an eagerness to master the NVIDIA software stack. C++ familiarity is good to have.

## WHY THIS ROLE

- Direct Impact: Your tools will be the gatekeeper for what defines "good" performance for our customers.
- Deep Learning (Literally): You will gain world-class expertise in GPU orchestration and LLM inference that few engineers in the industry possess.
- High Ownership: As the lead of a small team, you will have the autonomy to build tools from scratch and contribute to open-source projects.

## BENEFITS

- Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
- (U.S. only) 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
- Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
- Paid parental leave
- Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
- (U.S. only) Company-facilitated 401(k)
- Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you. At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).

## About Baseten

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Baseten is an AI infrastructure platform that provides high-performance inference infrastructure for deploying, optimizing, and managing AI models in production.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series F)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Tuhin Srivastava (CEO), Amir Haghighat (CTO), Phil Howes (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: AI Infrastructure / Cloud Computing / MLOps
- **Target customers**: B2B, targeting AI-native companies, enterprises, and developers building and deploying large-scale AI applications. Notable customers include Abridge, Cursor, Lovable, Notion, and OpenEvidence.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: Provide the tooling, expertise, and hardware needed for teams to bring performant AI products to market as quickly and reliably as possible. The company's core belief is that "inference is everything" and that the future of AI will consist of millions of specialized models embedded into every product and workflow.

## Products & Services
- **Baseten Cloud**: A fully-managed, global deployment platform for AI models. Provides out-of-the-box performance optimizations, 99.99% uptime, and massive horizontal scale. Supports single-tenant and self-hosted (hybrid) deployments.
- **Baseten Inference Stack**: The proprietary, underlying technology that powers the platform. Includes custom model runtimes (LLMs, embeddings, voice AI, image generation), advanced caching, custom kernels, and cutting-edge performance research. Claims 2x higher throughput and 10% lower latency for embeddings (BEI).
- **Baseten Chains**: Enables granular hardware and autoscaling for compound AI systems, reportedly powering 6x better GPU usage and cutting latency in half.
- **Frontier Gateway (Pre-optimized Model APIs)**: Allows users to instantly test and deploy pre-optimized versions of the latest open-source, custom, and fine-tuned models (e.g., Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM, gpt-oss).
- **Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)**: A service offering where Baseten engineers work side-by-side with key customers to build, optimize, and scale their models from prototype to production.
- **Training on Baseten**: Allows users to train models and deploy them in one click on the inference-optimized infrastructure.
- **Monetization API**: An inference API that allows model developers to monetize their models.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not privately disclosed, but the company has raised a total of **$585M** in funding.
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue of **$7.0M** (as per LinkedIn). Total funding of **$585M**.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: IVP, Spark Capital, Bond, CapitalG, South Park Commons, Greylock.
- **Growth Signals**:
    - Announced a **Series F** funding round (details not fully public in search results).
    - **Massive headcount growth**: 224.4% year-over-year, now employing 201 people.
    - **LinkedIn follower growth**: 199.9% year-over-year.
    - **Active job postings**: 112 open roles.
    - Acquired the company **Parsed**.
    - Backed by high-profile institutional investors including CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund) and IVP.

## Competitive Advantages
- **High-Performance Inference Stack**: A proprietary, deeply optimized stack focusing on ultra-low latency and high throughput for the most demanding Gen AI workloads (voice AI, real-time streaming, complex compound AI systems).
- **Customer Obsession & Forward Deployed Engineering**: A hands-on, consulting-style approach with their FDE team, which builds deep, sticky relationships with high-value customers like Abridge and Notion.
- **Global & Hybrid Cloud Flexibility**: Offers both fully-managed cloud and self-hosted deployments within customer VPCs, providing scalability and security for enterprises with strict data governance requirements.
- **Founding Team's Deep Technical Credibility**: Built by former researchers and engineers who experienced the "deployment hell" of AI systems firsthand, giving them deep empathy and expertise in the problem they are solving.

## Strategic Focus
- **Dominating the "Inference-as-a-Service" Market**: The company's core thesis is that inference will become the largest market ever created, and they are building the infrastructure to power it.
- **Scaling for High-Volume, Mission-Critical Workloads**: Focus on reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency for customers who cannot afford downtime or latency (e.g., AI phone calls, real-time translation).
- **Deepening the Technical Stack**: Continuously investing in performance research (custom kernels, new decoding techniques) and expanding capabilities into new areas like voice AI and audio streaming.
- **Aggressive Hiring**: With 112 open positions and massive YoY growth, scaling the engineering, sales, and operations teams is a clear priority.

## Why Work Here
- **Hard Technical Problems**: Engineers work on the most challenging problems in modern infrastructure—model serving, low-level GPU optimization, networking, distributed systems, and observability. This is a high-agency, high-impact engineering environment.
- **High Growth Trajectory**: The company is experiencing explosive growth (224% headcount increase, active hiring). This offers significant career acceleration and ownership opportunities.
- **Strong Engineering Culture**: Founded by engineers, for engineers. The culture emphasizes "first-principles thinking across the entire stack" and a "customer-obsessed" mindset. The employer rating on compensation, culture, and work-life balance is rated highly (5.0).
- **Top-Tier Team & Investors**: The team has strong talent density with hires from Meta, Stripe, Google, NVIDIA, and Databricks. Being backed by top-tier VCs provides stability and a clear long-term vision.
- **Hybrid/In-Office**: Based in San Francisco with a strong in-person or hybrid culture common for fast-moving infrastructure startups.

## Sources
1. [Company Website](https://www.baseten.co/)
2. [Careers Page](https://www.baseten.co/resources/careers/)
3. [About Us (Team)](https://www.baseten.co/about-us/)
4. [LinkedIn Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/baseten)
5. [Ashby Careers Portal](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten)

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