
Software Engineer - Training Product at Baseten (San Francisco, CA)
Baseten· San Francisco, CA· $165k–$330k·
Role details
Competitive Compensation · Equity · 100% Coverage Of Medical, Dental, And Vision Insurance · Flexible PTO Policy · Company Wide Winter Break · Paid Parental Leave · Fertility And Family-Building Stipend · Company-Facilitated 401(K)
Baseten at a glance
AI inference platform for deploying, optimizing, and running machine learning models in production at scale.
Baseten runs trained AI models in production for other companies, handling the GPUs, autoscaling, runtime, and performance tuning so engineering teams get a fast, reliable API without operating the infrastructure themselves. It supports open source, custom, and fine tuned models across managed cloud, hybrid, and self hosted deployments.
$2B+ raised · latest: Series F · $1.5B · June 2026 (valuations of $13B and $11B across two tranches) · backed by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, Spark Capital, Sands Capital
Summary
Build and ship features for the training product, including multi-node training and serverless reinforcement learning. Own the full stack from API and UI to infrastructure, fine-tune models, and partner with research engineers to optimize training workflows.
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, 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’re looking for a customer-obsessed software engineer to come ship with us. You’ll own features like multi-node training and products like serverless reinforcement learning (RL) from conception to MVP (and from MVP to GA!). You’ll work through the stack, architecting solutions from API and UI down to our infrastructure layer. You’ll fine tune models yourself to develop an understanding of user workflows. You’ll work closely with research engineers leveraging state-of-the-art training techniques to build experiences that accelerate model development and solve for real pain points. If you’re excited to dive deep into the training, let’s talk!
THE PRODUCT
Take a look at what we’ve built so far:
EXAMPLE INITIATIVES
- Checkpointing Pipeline: Our checkpointing pipeline starts with automated checkpointing, a feature that ensures that versions of models created during training are automatically backed up to the cloud. Users are able to then deploy checkpoints seamlessly into inference servers, providing point-and-click integrations into inference frameworks like vLLM and Baseten’s Inference Stack. This enables customers to quickly evaluate the performance of their checkpoints with real traffic.
- Multinode training: Multinode training enables customers to easily run training jobs across multiple compute nodes, enabling users to train large models like GLM 4.7 and DeepSeek. We’ve built deeply at the Kubernetes layer to ensure that scheduling, startup, inter-node communication, and shutdown happen seamlessly under the hood and as the user expects.
- Training DX: Customers come to train on Baseten because it helps them get to value fast. To do this, we ensure that the features we ship aren’t just fast, but are easy to iterate with. We enhanced Baseten’s metrics from pod-level GPU summaries to per-GPU and per-Node. We’ve built a CLI experience that caters to terminal users, and UI experiences that enable user to seamlessly manage their training jobs.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Iterate like crazy
- Design ergonomic APIs and abstractions to model complex resources and lifecycles
- Work throughout the stack (API layer, backend and database implementation, infra layer; frontend is a plus) to implement features.
- Fine-tune and deploy models to develop intuition around training workflows.
- Partner closely with model developers and world-class research engineers to understand the requirements and pain points of post-training workflows.
- Drive long-term improvements to improve reliability of systems and velocity of development
- Fix bugs & resolve customer issues with urgency
REQUIREMENTS
- 5+ years experience building software applications
- Deep knowledge of the web stack, databases, and distributed systems
- Experience developing developer tooling or infrastructure products for external or internal users.
- Good taste in product, particularly developer-oriented tools
- Interest in ML/AI infrastructure and willingness to learn
- Driven by high agency and ownership
- Strong communication skills with the ability to bridge technical depth and business needs
NICE TO HAVE
- Experience launching features and products through different release cycles (MVP, Beta, GA, etc.)
- Experience with model development methods and paradigms, like Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning, Synthetic Data Generation, LoRA, Full Finetunes, etc.
- Familiarity or experience with the open source training stack and frameworks (NCCL, PyTorch, Megatron, NemoRL, VeRL, Axolotl, HF Trainer) and distributed training techniques (FSDP, DeepSpeed).
- Experience developing AI products, tooling, or agents
- Frontend fluency
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).
Why work at Baseten
- 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.