Member of Technical Staff, Software Engineer
Fireworks AI is hiring a Member of Technical Staff, Software Engineer in San Mateo, United States. It pays $200k-$290k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Fireworks AI.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The listed pay starts 19% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include PyTorch and fine tuning.
- Level classifies it as a lead role.
- Level lists 90 other open roles at Fireworks AI.
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:
You’ll be a core builder of the backend systems that power Fireworks:
Our main web application
Model and fine-tuning job orchestration
Billing and enterprise features
Accounts, org management, access controls
Policy enforcement and governance
APIs and developer tooling
And many other cool things!
This is platform engineering with product impact. Your systems will directly shape how customers build on top of AI. You’ll work closely with product, frontend, infra, and GTM to ship end-to-end features — not just tickets.
What You’ll DoDesign and build scalable backend services
Own major product surfaces from architecture to production
Improve reliability, performance, and developer experience
Work directly with customers to understand pain points
Ship enterprise-grade features without enterprise slowness
Use AI tooling aggressively — we expect you to automate yourself
You like building real products, not just infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake
You enjoy driving initiatives across teams to get things done
You think in terms of systems, tradeoffs, and business impact
You care about developer experience and clean abstractions
You’re curious about AI and want to build where the future is going
You want ownership, not task lists
Comfortable collaborating with both humans and AI systems (Yes, We’re Serious)
5+ years of experience helping humans solve real problems
2+ years of working with AI — agents, bots, chats, or building on top of models
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, Software Engineer at Fireworks AI rates 91 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
Pay
- This job starts at
- $200k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 19% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
- Walk me through how you've used PyTorch in your day-to-day work.
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
- Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Fine-tuning and PyTorch. 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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