What are the responsibilities and job description for the Software Engineer – Python Developer Tools position at FriendliAI?
About The Job
FriendliAI is hiring a Python Engineer to build developer tools for our users and internal engineers. The software developed by the engineer will be the primary way developers integrate with our inference and agent platform. Your work will remove friction for internal teams and external users. You’ll design ergonomic & stable APIs, reliable releases to PyPI, and drive top-tier developer experience across documentation, examples, and tooling. You’ll collaborate with frontend engineers on end-to-end workflows and partner with product & engineering teams.
Key Responsibilities
FriendliAI is building the world’s best AI inference platform that makes large language and multi-modal models fast, efficient, and deployable at scale. We power high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide and integrate directly with Hugging Face, giving developers instant access to over 500,000 open-source models.
We are a small, fast-moving team doing work that matters at one of the most exciting moments in the history of technology. With our world-class inference engine, we are building a platform that the AI industry can actually rely on.
FriendliAI is hiring a Python Engineer to build developer tools for our users and internal engineers. The software developed by the engineer will be the primary way developers integrate with our inference and agent platform. Your work will remove friction for internal teams and external users. You’ll design ergonomic & stable APIs, reliable releases to PyPI, and drive top-tier developer experience across documentation, examples, and tooling. You’ll collaborate with frontend engineers on end-to-end workflows and partner with product & engineering teams.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the Python SDK lifecycle. You will design APIs and implement the client side in the SDK.
- Build and maintain a cross-platform CLI with a modern interface, including helpful error messages and good UX.
- Manage packaging and distribution pipelines.
- Develop and maintain internal developer tools related to DevOps.
- Create examples, templates, and guides that help developers effectively utilize our software bundles.
- 3 years of professional Python engineering building libraries, SDKs, or developer tools used in production.
- Demonstrated SDK/CLI ownership. Familiarity with API ergonomics and versioning, deprecation policies, telemetry, and debugging customer issues.
- Strong Python fundamentals, including asyncio, typing, packaging, and testing.
- Web API fluency in REST and gRPC.
- Experience working with Python monorepos.
- Clear written communication skills and capable of turning complex features into clean APIs and concise docs.
- Maintainer or significant OSS contributor in Python libraries (tooling, SDK, CLI, etc.).
- Experience with Python AST and Meta-programming, Packaging
- Performance work (profiling, streaming, backpressure) or multi-platform build experience.
- Cross‑language exposure (TypeScript/Node, Go).
- Containers & local dev tooling (Docker); familiarity with Kubernetes basics.
- Experience with LLM/agent SDKs or inference workflows.
- Flexible working hours
- Daily lunch and dinner provided; unlimited snacks and beverages
- Supportive and highly collaborative work environment
- Health check-up support and top-tier equipment/hardware support
- A front-row seat to the generative AI infrastructure revolution
- Competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits.
FriendliAI is building the world’s best AI inference platform that makes large language and multi-modal models fast, efficient, and deployable at scale. We power high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide and integrate directly with Hugging Face, giving developers instant access to over 500,000 open-source models.
We are a small, fast-moving team doing work that matters at one of the most exciting moments in the history of technology. With our world-class inference engine, we are building a platform that the AI industry can actually rely on.