Senior/Staff AI Engineer

DataDirect Networks Inc
  • CA
    3 days ago

    Job Description

    What you'll do

    • Build and optimize LLM serving and inference systems for production environments

    • Improve performance across GPU and CPU pathways

    • Work on KV cache, memory, storage, and throughput bottlenecks

    • Design and scale systems that support RAG and retrieval-heavy AI workloads

    • Contribute to infrastructure where storage architecture and systems efficiency materially affect AI performance

    • Solve engineering problems at the intersection of AI, high-performance systems, and distributed infrastructure

    What we're looking for

    • An engineer who has spent meaningful time building or optimizing production AI systems, not just experimenting with models

    • Someone who understands how inference performance is shaped by the interaction between compute, memory, storage, and serving architecture

    • Deep hands-on experience working close to the systems layer - for example, improving how workloads run across GPU and CPU resources, reducing bottlenecks, or tuning infrastructure for better throughput and latency

    • Evidence of real ownership in areas like model serving, retrieval, caching, storage, or distributed performance, rather than purely application-layer AI work

    • The ability to move comfortably between architecture decisions and hands-on implementation, especially in environments where efficiency and scale matter

    • A background that suggests you can operate in technically demanding environments, whether that comes from AI infrastructure, high-performance systems, storage platforms, or adjacent distributed systems work

    • PhD preferred, but far less important than having built serious systems in the real world

    Why this role is compelling

    • This is not a "prompt engineering" job.

    • This is not an "AI wrapper" job.

    • This is not a generic backend role with AI sprinkled on top.

    • This is a chance to work on the infrastructure that determines whether modern AI systems are fast, scalable, efficient, and commercially viable.

    • If you want to work on the real mechanics of AI performance - serving, retrieval, compute efficiency, memory behavior, storage architecture, and inference at scale - this is where that work happens.

    Who will love this role

    • Engineers who enjoy deep systems problems

    • Builders who care about performance, scale, and architecture

    • People who want to work where AI meets infrastructure

    • Candidates who would rather solve hard technical bottlenecks than ship surface-level AI features

    Who should not apply

    This role is not for:

    • Purely academic researchers without meaningful production ownership

    • Generic software engineers without clear AI systems or inference depth

    • Candidates focused mainly on prompt engineering or lightweight application integrations

    • MLOps generalists who have not worked deeply on serving, storage, or performance-critical AI systems

    Numbers & Facts

    LocationCA

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