Senior Backend Engineer, Inference Platform

Reposted 2 Months Ago
San Francisco, CA, USA
In-Office
160K-250K Annually
Senior level
Artificial Intelligence • Information Technology
The Role
The Senior Backend Engineer will optimize and build systems for the Inference Platform, focusing on low-latency, scalability, and performance for generative AI models. Responsibilities include enhancing request routing, developing auto-scaling systems, and collaborating with ML researchers to implement new model architectures in production.
Summary Generated by Built In
About the Role

Together AI is building the Inference Platform that brings the most advanced generative AI models to the world. Our platform powers multi-tenant serverless workloads and dedicated endpoints, enabling developers, enterprises, and researchers to harness the latest LLMs, multimodal models, image, audio, video, and speech models at scale.

If you get a thrill from optimizing latency down to the last millisecond, this is your playground. You’ll work hands-on with tens of thousands of GPUs (H100s, H200s, GB200s, and beyond), figuring out how to fully utilize every FLOP and every gigabyte of memory.

You’ll collaborate directly with research teams to bring frontier models into production, making breakthroughs usable in the real world. Our team also works closely with the open source community, contributing to and leveraging projects like SGLang, vLLM, and NVIDIA Dynamo to push the boundaries of inference performance and efficiency.

  • Shape the core inference backbone that powers Together AI’s frontier models.
  • Solve performance-critical challenges in global request routing, load balancing, and large-scale resource allocation.
  • Work with state-of-the-art accelerators (H100s, H200s, GB200s) at global scale.
  • Partner with world-class researchers to bring new model architectures into production.
  • Collaborate with and contribute to the open source community, shaping the tools that advance the industry.
  • A culture of deep technical ownership and high impact — where your work makes models faster, cheaper, and more accessible.
  • Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits.
Responsibilities 
  • Build and optimize global and local request routing, ensuring low-latency load balancing across data centers and model engine pods.
  • Develop auto-scaling systems to dynamically allocate resources and meet strict SLOs across dozens of data centers.
  • Design systems for multi-tenant traffic shaping, tuning both resource allocation and request handling — including smart rate limiting and regulation — to ensure fairness and consistent experience across all users.
  • Engineer trade-offs between latency and throughput to serve diverse workloads efficiently.
  • Optimize prefix caching to reduce model compute and speed up responses.
  • Collaborate with ML researchers to bring new model architectures into production at scale.
  • Continuously profile and analyze system-level performance to identify bottlenecks and implement optimizations.
Requirements
  • 5+ years of demonstrated experience building large-scale, fault-tolerant, distributed systems and API microservices.
  • Strong background in designing, analyzing, and improving efficiency, scalability, and stability of complex systems.
  • Excellent understanding of low-level OS concepts: multi-threading, memory management, networking, and storage performance.
  • Expert-level programming in one or more of: Rust, Go, Python, or TypeScript.
  • Knowledge of modern LLMs and generative models and how they are served in production is a plus.
  • Experience working with the open source ecosystem around inference is highly valuable; familiarity with SGLang, vLLM, or NVIDIA Dynamo will be especially handy.
  • Experience with Kubernetes or container orchestration is a strong plus.
  • Familiarity with GPU software stacks (CUDA, Triton, NCCL) and HPC technologies (InfiniBand, NVLink, MPI) is a plus.
  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
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: $200,000 - $290,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.

Application Policy

Please read each role carefully and apply to the position best suited to you. Candidates are limited to 6 applications within a 90-day period, and applications beyond that limit will be automatically rejected. You may apply to additional roles 90 days after your last application.

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  

Skills Required

  • 5+ years of experience building large-scale, distributed systems
  • Strong background in API microservices
  • Expert-level programming in Rust, Go, Python, or TypeScript
  • Excellent understanding of low-level OS concepts
  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Together AI Compensation & Benefits Highlights

The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Together AI and has not been reviewed or approved by Together AI.

  • Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is considered competitive for the company’s stage, with especially strong offers for technical and research roles. A posted AI researcher range reaching into the high-$200Ks alongside equity and benefits reinforces the overall pay positioning.
  • Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity is commonly included alongside base salary, giving employees ownership exposure tied to company growth. Total compensation is often framed around salary plus equity for specialized roles.
  • Flexible Benefits — Job listings describe a flexible time‑off policy and hybrid or remote work options. Commuter perks and regular team events are also cited as part of the package.

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The Company
HQ: Surry Hills
84 Employees
Year Founded: 2022

What We Do

Together AI is a research-driven artificial intelligence company. We contribute leading open-source research, models, and datasets to advance the frontier of AI. Our decentralized cloud services empower developers and researchers at organizations of all sizes to train, fine-tune, and deploy generative AI models. We believe open and transparent AI systems will drive innovation and create the best outcomes for society

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