Demo

LLM Inference Frameworks and Optimization Engineer

Together AI
San Francisco, CA Intern
POSTED ON 1/6/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 2/19/2026
About The Role

At Together.ai, we are building state-of-the-art infrastructure to enable efficient and scalable inference for large language models (LLMs). Our mission is to optimize inference frameworks, algorithms, and infrastructure, pushing the boundaries of performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency.

We are seeking an Inference Frameworks and Optimization Engineer to design, develop, and optimize distributed inference engines that support multimodal and language models at scale. This role will focus on low-latency, high-throughput inference, GPU/accelerator optimizations, and software-hardware co-design, ensuring efficient large-scale deployment of LLMs and vision models.

This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of LLM inference infrastructure, ensuring scalable, high-performance AI deployment across a diverse range of applications. If you're passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI inference, we’d love to hear from you!

Responsibilities

Inference Framework Development and Optimization

  • Design and develop fault-tolerant, high-concurrency distributed inference engine for text, image, and multimodal generation models.
  • Implement and optimize distributed inference strategies, including Mixture of Experts (MoE) parallelism, tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism for high-performance serving.
  • Apply CUDA graph optimizations, TensorRT/TRT-LLM graph optimizations, and PyTorch-based compilation (torch.compile), and speculative decoding to enhance efficiency and scalability.

Software-Hardware Co-Design and AI Infrastructure

  • Collaborate with hardware teams on performance bottleneck analysis, co-optimize inference performance for GPUs, TPUs, or custom accelerators.
  • Work closely with AI researchers and infrastructure engineers to develop efficient model execution plans and optimize E2E model serving pipelines.

Requirements

Must-Have:

  • Experience:
    • 3 years of experience in deep learning inference frameworks, distributed systems, or high-performance computing.
  • Technical Skills:
    • Familiar with at least one LLM inference frameworks (e.g., TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, SGLang, TGI(Text Generation Inference)).
    • Background knowledge and experience in at least one of the following: GPU programming (CUDA/Triton/TensorRT), compiler, model quantization, and GPU cluster scheduling.
    • Deep understanding of KV cache systems like Mooncake, PagedAttention, or custom in-house variants.
  • Programming:
    • Proficient in Python and C /CUDA for high-performance deep learning inference.
  • Optimization Techniques:
    • Deep understanding of Transformer architectures and LLM/VLM/Diffusion model optimization.
    • Knowledge of inference optimization, such as workload scheduling, CUDA graph, compiled, efficient kernels
  • Soft Skills:
    • Strong analytical problem-solving skills with a performance-driven mindset.
    • Excellent collaboration and communication skills across teams.
Nice-to-Have

  • Experience in developing software systems for large-scale data center networks with RDMA/RoCE
  • Familiar with distributed filesystem(e.g., 3FS, HDFS, Ceph)
  • Familiar with open source distributed scheduling/orchestration frameworks, such as Kubernetes (K8S)
  • Contributions to open-source deep learning inference projects.

About Together AI

Together AI is a research-driven artificial intelligence company. We believe open and transparent AI systems will drive innovation and create the best outcomes for society, and together we are on a mission to significantly lower the cost of modern AI systems by co-designing software, hardware, algorithms, and models. We have contributed to leading open-source research, models, and datasets to advance the frontier of AI, and our team has been behind technological advancement such as FlashAttention, Hyena, FlexGen, and RedPajama. We invite you to join a passionate group of researchers in our journey in building the next generation AI infrastructure.

Compensation

We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance and other competitive benefits. The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $160,000 - $230,000 equity benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.

Equal Opportunity

Together AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and more.

Please see our privacy policy at https://www.together.ai/privacy

Salary : $160,000 - $230,000

If your compensation planning software is too rigid to deploy winning incentive strategies, it’s time to find an adaptable solution. Compensation Planning
Enhance your organization's compensation strategy with salary data sets that HR and team managers can use to pay your staff right. Surveys & Data Sets

What is the career path for a LLM Inference Frameworks and Optimization Engineer?

Sign up to receive alerts about other jobs on the LLM Inference Frameworks and Optimization Engineer career path by checking the boxes next to the positions that interest you.
Income Estimation: 
$126,656 - $180,837
Income Estimation: 
$149,464 - $205,507
Income Estimation: 
$101,387 - $124,118
Income Estimation: 
$119,030 - $151,900
Income Estimation: 
$119,030 - $151,900
Income Estimation: 
$149,493 - $192,976
Income Estimation: 
$184,796 - $233,226
Income Estimation: 
$179,606 - $233,815
Income Estimation: 
$77,900 - $95,589
Income Estimation: 
$101,387 - $124,118
View Core, Job Family, and Industry Job Skills and Competency Data for more than 15,000 Job Titles Skills Library

Job openings at Together AI

  • Together AI San Francisco, CA
  • Customer Support Engineer Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) About the role: As a Customer Support Engineer at a pioneering AI company, you'll be the fir... more
  • 14 Days Ago

  • Together AI San Francisco, CA
  • About The Role Together AI is seeking a Distributed ML Systems Engineer to design and build scalable machine learning systems that power our accelerated AI... more
  • 15 Days Ago

  • Together AI San Francisco, CA
  • About Model Shaping The Model Shaping team at Together AI works on products and research for tailoring open foundation models to downstream applications. W... more
  • 15 Days Ago

  • Together AI San Francisco, CA
  • This role focuses on enabling custom models and dedicated inference on Together. We are responsible for optimizing autoscaling, minimizing cold starts, ach... more
  • 16 Days Ago


Not the job you're looking for? Here are some other LLM Inference Frameworks and Optimization Engineer jobs in the San Francisco, CA area that may be a better fit.

  • togetherai San Francisco, CA
  • About the Role At Together.ai, we are building state-of-the-art infrastructure to enable efficient and scalable inference for large language models (LLMs).... more
  • 29 Days Ago

  • Together AI San Francisco, CA
  • Role At Together.ai, we are building cutting-edge infrastructure to enable efficient and scalable training of large language models (LLMs). We focus on opt... more
  • 19 Days Ago

AI Assistant is available now!

Feel free to start your new journey!