Member of Technical Staff, LLM Infrastructure
Fireworks AI is hiring a Member of Technical Staff, LLM Infrastructure in San Mateo, United States. It pays $175k-$220k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Fireworks AI.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this role: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting mentions Vertex AI, vLLM and PyTorch among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a lead role.
- Fireworks AI has 90 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
About Us:
Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI.
The Role:
As a Software Engineer on our AI Infrastructure team, you will help design the core systems that power Fireworks AI’s generative AI platform. You will help build infrastructure and tools that ensure the reliability, performance, quality, and availability of our AI system.
Our mission is to make Fireworks AI the most reliable and user friendly generative AI platform in the world. You will partner closely with our cloud infrastructure team, product team, and performance team to deliver infrastructure that bridges the gap between our customer and the ultra-performant proprietary Fireworks inference engine.
Key Responsibilities:
Contribute to the design and development of scalable backend infrastructure that supports distributed training, inference, and data pipelines
Build and maintain core backend services such as LLM CI/CD pipeline, control plane, and model serving systems
Support performance optimization, cost efficiency, and reliability improvements across compute, storage, and networking layers
Building frameworks and safeguards to ensure Fireworks AI has the best model quality in the industry
Collaborate with performance, training, and product teams to translate research and product needs into infrastructure solutions
Participate in code reviews, technical discussions, and continuous integration and deployment processes
Minimum Qualifications:
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
3 years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on infrastructure or machine learning systems
Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or a similar language
Proven experience in ML infrastructure and tooling (e.g., PyTorch, MLflow, Vertex AI, SageMaker, Kubernetes, etc.).
Basic understanding of LLM knowledge (e.g., context length, disaggregated prefill, KV cache memory estimation, etc)
Preferred Qualifications:
5+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on infrastructure or machine learning systems
Experience with open source inference engine like vLLM, Sglang, or TRT-LLM
Contributions to open-source infrastructure or ML projects
Experience in building large scale ML/MLOps infrastructure
Why Fireworks?
Solve Hard Problems: Tackle challenges at the forefront of AI infrastructure, from low-latency inference to scalable model serving.
Build What’s Next: Work with bleeding-edge technology that impacts how businesses and developers harness AI globally.
Ownership & Impact: Join a fast-growing, passionate team where your work directly shapes the future of AI—no bureaucracy, just results.
Learn from the Best: Collaborate with world-class engineers and AI researchers who thrive on curiosity and innovation.
Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all innovators.
How we rate this
Member of Technical Staff, LLM Infrastructure at Fireworks AI rates 98 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.
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. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- How do you monitor a model once it's live, and how do you know it needs retraining?
- Walk me through how you've used Vertex AI in your day-to-day work.
- What are the limits of vLLM that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
- What's a project where you used PyTorch hands-on?
- Walk me through how you've used MLflow in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: ML Ops, Vertex AI, vLLM, PyTorch, and MLflow. 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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