Inference Engineer, AGI

AI in this role

Build and optimize the real-time inference serving stack and runtime for multimodal conversational AI models.

vllmpytorchrunwaynsight

speechinferencemachine-learningcudaperformance-optimizationdistributed-systems

We are looking for an Inference Engineer to help serve inference for real-time multimodal conversational AI. This is a full-stack inference role: you will work across the path a model takes from research to production, helping shape model architecture so it is servable, building the real-time runtime that serves it within hard latency budgets, and building the offline systems that train and reinforce it.

You will operate at the boundary of Science and Inference, taking frontier-scale speech and audio models and helping make them run within real-time latency budgets on production hardware. You will help co-design architectures with scientists to make them inference-friendly, contribute to the low-latency streaming serving path, and help build the training and reinforcement-learning infrastructure that closes the loop. You will have the compute, data, and runway to work on problems that few teams in the world are positioned to tackle.

As an Inference Engineer, you will own well-scoped components of the inference stack, drive their technical execution with guidance, and work closely with scientists and senior engineers to help ensure our models run fast enough to feel human in real time, and at a cost that makes them viable at scale. You may go deep in one of the areas below while contributing across the others.

Key job responsibilities
Model Architecture & Inference Co-Design
- Partner with research scientists and senior engineers to help make model architectures servable, surfacing the latency, memory, and cost implications of architecture choices
- Implement and optimize parts of the inference path for large-scale multimodal models, attention and KV-cache mechanisms, multimodal/autoregressive decoding, and the compute primitives on the critical path
- Apply efficiency techniques across the stack, quantization (per-tensor/per-channel/per-group, INT8/FP8/BF16), speculative decoding, operator fusion, and paged KV-cache, and measure their quality/latency trade-offs
- Help develop and tune high-performance kernels for critical operations where off-the-shelf implementations leave performance on the table, integrating them into production serving
- Profile end-to-end performance with tools such as Nsight Compute/Systems and roofline analysis to help identify and eliminate bottlenecks in large-scale inference workloads

Real-Time & Interactive Runtime
- Contribute to the real-time serving path for streaming multimodal conversational AI, helping meet sub-second, streaming latency budgets under concurrent session load
- Build and tune continuous batching, scheduling, and preemption to balance throughput against per-request latency SLAs for interactive workloads
- Customize production serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, PyTorch) for real-time streaming generative models that fall outside standard LLM serving patterns
- Implement multi-GPU inference (tensor parallelism, collective communication) for latency-critical paths, and help drive cost toward parity with existing production baselines
- Help establish latency, throughput, and cost benchmarking, and publish the operational metrics that gate deployment

Offline Systems: Training, RL & Evaluation Infrastructure
- Build and scale parts of the offline inference systems behind post-training, high-throughput rollout generation and reward-model serving for reinforcement learning (RL/RLHF/RLAIF)
- Help ensure train/serve consistency, that the inference path used in RL and evaluation faithfully matches production online behavior (e.g., parity across sampling and logit processing)
- Work with the evaluation team to enable offline inference that captures the quality dimensions unique to real-time conversation, latency sensitivity, audio quality, and interaction naturalness

Basic qualifications

- Master's degree or equivalent
- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 3+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 2+ years of experience contributing to the design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
- 1+ years of hands-on experience optimizing inference for neural models, not just using inference frameworks, but profiling and improving them
- Solid understanding of deep learning architectures (transformers, attention mechanisms, autoregressive decoding) and their application to speech/audio or other multimodal domains
- Experience contributing to latency-constrained, real-time inference systems under concurrent load
- Experience with GPU performance optimization, memory hierarchy, occupancy, KV-cache management, and the accelerator programming model
- Demonstrated ownership of a technical component, driving execution and collaborating across scientists and engineers

Preferred qualifications

- Experience building complex software systems that have been successfully delivered to customers
- Exposure to production LLM/multimodal serving internals (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM): scheduler, batching, block manager, sampler customization
- Hands-on experience building real-time or streaming AI systems, speech, audio, or video, with hard latency budgets
- Experience authoring custom GPU kernels (CUTLASS, Triton, raw CUDA/PTX), fused attention (FlashAttention-style), or quantized GEMM
- Familiarity with model-compression and efficiency techniques, quantization, pruning, distillation, speculative decoding, long-context optimization
- Experience building offline inference or rollout/reward-serving infrastructure for reinforcement learning or large-scale evaluation
- Experience with distributed training and post-training pipelines (SFT through RL), parallelism strategies, training stability, and multi-accelerator communication (NCCL, NVLink)
- Familiarity with multiple hardware backends (NVIDIA GPU, AWS Neuron/Trainium, edge accelerators) and how architecture choices affect inference latency, memory, and cost
- Background in speech-to-speech or audio generative models (codec models, autoregressive audio generation), speech recognition, or speech synthesis
- Experience shipping research to production at scale, models serving real users, not just benchmark results
- Contributions to open-source inference/kernel projects (vLLM, CUTLASS, FlashAttention, TensorRT-LLM, Triton, or similar)

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, CA, Sunnyvale - 165,200.00 - 223,600.00 USD annually
USA, MA, Boston - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Inference Engineer, AGI at Amazon rates 95 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.

Key facts

Inference Engineer, AGI is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $165k-$224k a year.
The role is based in US, CA, Sunnyvale.
The job was posted on October 5, 2026.
Seniority: mid.
Applications are handled by Amazon. Apply on Amazon

Prepare for this job

A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

SpeechInferenceMachine LearningCudaPerformance OptimizationDistributed SystemsvLLMPyTorch

Questions you could be asked

What have you built with speech recognition or text-to-speech, and where did it break?
Tell me about a project where inference was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where cuda was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where performance optimization was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: Speech, Inference, Machine Learning, Cuda, and Performance Optimization. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Lead with what you built, trained or shipped — this role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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