(Staff / Senior Staff) AI Infra Engineer, Inference Infrastructure
Together AI
San Francisco, CA · $250k–$320k a year · Posted October 21, 2026
Just laid off? Start here: a plan for the first weeks
See every open role at Together AI
More in California job market · Technology & Software · Data & Analytics jobs
More roles at Together AI
- Engineering Manager, Kubernetes Bare Metal Infrastructure · San Francisco, CA
- Senior Web & Inbound Growth Manager · San Francisco, CA
- Senior Recruiter, G&A · San Francisco, CA
- Director, Debt Capital Markets · San Francisco, CA
- Sr. Field Marketing & Community Manager · New York, NY
- Recruiting Sourcer, Business (GTM, Infrastructure Strategy & G&A) · San Francisco, CA
Similar jobs
- Sr Principal Engineer AI/ML · GlobalFoundries · Santa Clara, CA
- Developer Relations Manager, Higher Education and Research - Foundational AI · Nvidia · Santa Clara, CA
- #Machine Learning Engineer - Generative AI · Qualcomm Technologies · San Diego, CA
- Computer Scientist (Ph.D.) · Exponent · Menlo Park, CA
- Electrical Engineer/Scientist/Computer Scientist (Ph.D.) · Exponent · Los Angeles, CA
- Staff People Analyst - Applied AI · Intuit · Mountain View, CA
Where San Francisco, CA ranks
Where San Francisco, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for security jobs316 openings · of 20
- #1Best cities for technology jobs7,178 openings · of 100
- #1Best cities for financial services pay after cost of living$173k · of 33
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills35% · of 100
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast35% · of 54
- #1Cities with the most jobs that do not need a four-year degree in the West Coast902 jobs · of 47
Rankings about data & analytics jobs
- Best cities for data and analytics jobs #1 New York (1,713 openings)
- Best cities for data and analytics pay after cost of living #1 Foster ($232k)
- Most requested AI skills in data and analytics jobs #1 Machine learning engineering (17.1%)
- AI tools named most often in data and analytics jobs #1 Databricks (7.6%)
- Employers with the most data and analytics jobs #1 Amazon (711 roles)
Data & Analytics jobs · Top Data & Analytics employers · All rankings
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among computer and information research scientists, AI is already used for a large share of the tasks. Measured exposure for computer and information research scientists: 34% (high).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
Say which you have and which you want to build. We use it to match you to jobs like this one.
About the job
About The Role
We're looking for a software engineer, reliability-minded but still a builder, to own what happens in production to the Kubernetes-native control plane that provisions and runs our GPU inference fleet. The platform team builds the manifest-driven API and controllers that let the inference team declare what they need, a cluster, a model deployment, a capacity change, and get it reconciled underneath. Your job is to keep that promise true in the real world: triaging InfiniBand issues when prefill and decode nodes stall exchanging KV cache over RDMA, diagnosing hero-model and LoRA-serving faults that don't show up in generic health checks, and extending the automated self-healing system so each new failure mode becomes a permanent fix instead of a recurring page.
The core value we're after is keeping the decoupling real even when things break, and keeping the fleet efficient without that efficiency becoming a new source of instability. You'll own SLOs and error budgets for inference serving, lead incident response, and turn what postmortems teach you into actual changes in the controllers and automation, not just updated runbooks. You'll also work the reliability side of capacity efficiency, since a mistuned defragmentation or bin-packing pass is itself a production risk. Strong candidates have hands-on production-reliability experience on large-scale distributed or GPU-serving systems, are comfortable troubleshooting InfiniBand/RDMA and Kubernetes controller/CRD-based platforms, and think about GPU infrastructure, and the tools that keep it reliable, as software to be engineered.
A product mindset applies: the on-call experience, the clarity of an alert, and the judgment built into an automated remediation are things you ship and iterate on.
Responsibilities
Operate the provisioning state machine in production: own the health of the host lifecycle pipeline, discovery, inference bring-up, GPU driver/CUDA validation, health checks, decommission/RMA, triaging stuck or failed state transitions at fleet scale and feeding real failure patterns back into how the states and transitions are designed.
Triage and extend automated self-healing: when the node-scanning and remediation platform misses something, a new failure mode, an InfiniBand issue in disaggregated prefill/decode serving, a GPU Xid variant, a hero-model or LoRA-specific fault, diagnose it live, drive the fix to production, and turn it into a new detection/remediation plugin so it's automatic the next time.
Own end-to-end reliability of the pipeline: hold the SLOs and error budgets for provisioning and fleet health, lead incident response when idempotency, retry, rollback, or drift assumptions break down in practice, and drive the systemic fix, not just the hotfix.
Partner with the inference/ML platform team from the production side: be the one who knows how real cluster topologies, interconnects, and scheduling constraints actually fail in the field, and feed those failure modes back as first-class requirements into the platform's abstractions.
Work alongside machine learning researchers, engineers, and product managers to bring our latest technologies into production, enabling advanced research through awesome engineering.
Introduce new techniques, tools, and architecture that improve the performance, latency, throughput, and efficiency of our model inference stack.
Build tools to give us visibility into our bottlenecks and sources of instability, then design and implement solutions to address the highest-priority issues.
Lead reliability cross-functionally: build coalition across infra, ML platform, and product teams around shared reliability priorities, manage stakeholders through incidents and roadmap trade-offs, and represent the reliability point of view in planning so it shapes decisions before they ship, not after an outage.
Requirements
Experience operating a provisioning or host-lifecycle pipeline in production, comfortable troubleshooting stuck or failed state transitions (discovery, bring-up, GPU driver/CUDA validation, health checks, decommission/RMA) at fleet scale, and translating real failure patterns back into improvements to the state machine’s design.
Deep experience owning production reliability for large-scale distributed systems; GPU/ML-serving infrastructure experience is a strong plus.
Hands-on experience troubleshooting InfiniBand/RDMA networking issues, ideally in a multi-node training or disaggregated-inference context — comfortable reading IB port counters and subnet manager logs, not just application metrics.
Familiarity with the operational realities of multi-tenant model serving (LoRA/adapter-based serving) and with running differentiated SLOs across model pools of different priority.
A demonstrated track record of eliminating operational toil through automation and tooling you built yourself, not just process or documentation.
Hands-on experience with Kubernetes controller/CRD patterns, reconciliation loops, and node-level health/remediation systems.
Comfort with event-driven architectures, backpressure/circuit-breaking design, and treating observability (metrics, logs, traces) as something built into a system, not added after an incident.
A software-engineering mindset first: you write and ship production code, and you think about GPU infrastructure as software to be engineered, not a fleet to be manually operated.
About Together AI
Together AI, the AI Native Cloud, is purpose-built for AI engineers. AI application developers get high-performance inference that scales reliably, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for creating frontier-level specialized models, and pre-training at massive scale for fully custom intelligence, all around a marketplace of leading open models that teams can run, adapt, and own. Trusted by Cursor, Decagon, ElevenLabs, Salesforce, and Zoom, Together serves 400+ trillion tokens a month.
Compensation
We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance and other competitive benefits. The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $250,000 - $320,000 + 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 .