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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