Member of Technical Staff, Inference Systems
- Location
- Palo Alto
- Workplace
- On-site
- Employment
- Full-time
- Compensation
- $230k – $350k + equity
- Visa
- Visa Sponsorship Available
About this role
We are looking for a Member of Technical Staff, Inference Systems with 2+ years of experience to help build a high-performance AI inference platform from the ground up. You are a systems engineer who lives and breathes inference internals – attention, KV cache, batching, scheduling – and you want to own the entire stack rather than work on a narrow slice. You'll join a small, fast-moving team building a new inference system in Rust, where every design decision is yours to shape. If you've spent time inside engines like vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM and want to do the most impactful work of your career, this is the role.
What will you be doing?
- Build a new inference runtime from scratch in Rust – owning batching, scheduling, request routing, and the full serving stack.
- Design and implement KV cache management, prefix caching, and optimizations that directly reduce latency and cost per token.
- Scale serving across GPUs and nodes, tackling multi-GPU and multi-node challenges head-on.
- Profile, benchmark, and ship performance improvements across the entire inference pipeline.
- Collaborate closely with a small founding team to make core architectural decisions that define the platform.
What happens next
Skip the application pile. Clera gets you in front of the people who decide.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
Clera pitches you to the company
Clera writes the intro, sends it to the founder, and handles the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
When the company wants to meet, Clera gets the call on your calendar. You just show up.
Culture & values
Small, elite team of systems engineers who care deeply about the craft of building fast, reliable infrastructure
Ground-floor opportunity to shape architecture without legacy constraints
High pace work environment
Every engineer has outsized ownership and direct impact on core product
Laser-focused on building high-performance inference stack
Performance as a first-order concern in engineering decisions
Team architecting entire runtime from scratch rather than wrapping existing tools
Founding-stage team with significant growth hiring plans
Looking for engineers excited by hardest problems in LLM serving
Founded by engineers with deep roots in AI infrastructure space
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Ask about this role
Tell me about the Member of Technical Staff, Inference Systems role at Photon on Clera (https://www.getclera.com/jobs/photon/member-of-technical-staff-inference-systems--46iptbxundce). Does it fit my profile and preferences? If it does, tell Clera I'm interested.
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