Senior or Staff Software Engineer, Inference / Compute Infrastructure Engineering
Together AI is hiring a Senior or Staff Software Engineer, Inference / Compute Infrastructure Engineering in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Level rates it ; you can apply on Together AI.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Cursor, Elevenlabs and Decagon.
- Level classifies it as a lead role.
- Level lists 83 other open roles at Together AI.
AI in this role
About the Role
We're looking for a Software Engineer to build the systems that treat infrastructure as software. This role owns the software state machines that provision hardware, bring it into service, and manage its full lifecycle — turning racks of GPUs into running inference clusters without a human touching a runbook. The Research and Inference team is your customer: today they file tickets and wait; the target state is that they issue a single API call to stand up, scale, or tear down a cluster, and the system takes care of the rest. The platform is manifest-driven such that teams declare the desired state of a cluster or host — shape, topology, software stack — and the system is responsible for reconciling reality to that manifest, continuously, through every stage of its lifecycle. You will design the engines that manifest the schema, the engines that execute against it, and the workflows that carry a piece of hardware or a cluster from one state to the next—taking it from bare metal to a fully functioning AI cluster for training or inference.
You'll write production code which is typed, tested, versioned, and deployed through CI/CD that models infrastructure state and reconciles it, the same way a Kubernetes controller reconciles a cluster's desired state. Success looks like eliminating manual provisioning work, not documenting it better.
A product mindset - you've built internal platforms or APIs consumed by other engineering teams and care about the developer experience of what you ship.You build it, you own it. You are not only responsible for delivering the software but also for operating and supporting it in production.
Responsibilities
- Build the provisioning state machine: design and implement the software that models the full lifecycle of a physical host from discovery, inference bring-up to GPU driver/CUDA stack, health validation, and decommission/RMA — as explicit, versioned states and transitions.
- Build the self-service API: design declarative APIs and a control plane so the inference team can request, scale, and tear down inference clusters with one API call — no ticket, no human in the loop.
- Automate self-healing: detect degraded or failed nodes, drain them safely, trigger repair or replacement, and reintroduce healthy capacity into the pool automatically.
- Own reliability of the pipeline: idempotency, retries, rollback, and drift detection so the provisioning system is as dependable as any other production service.
- Partner with the inference/ML platform team: understand the cluster shapes they need — topology, interconnect, scheduling constraints — and encode them as first-class abstractions in the platform.
- Engineer it like software: strong typing, automated tests, code review, versioning, and CI/CD for infrastructure code — this is a product, not a collection of Ansible playbooks.
Requirements
Core requirements (all levels):
- Strong software engineering background in Go, Python, Rust, or similar — you write and test real software for a living.
- Experience with durable workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal, Cadence, or equivalent to run long-lived, manifest-driven workflows that survive failures and resume mid-execution.
- Experience building software control planes or orchestration systems that model state and reconcile it over time (e.g., Kubernetes controllers/operators, custom reconciliation loops, workflow engines).
- Experience with event-driven systems — designing and building software around message queues, event streams, or pub/sub (e.g., Kafka, NATS, SQS) rather than polling or cron-driven scripts.
- A product mindset. You’ve built internal platforms or APIs consumed by other engineering teams and care about the developer experience of what you ship.
Nice to have:
- Exposure to bare-metal provisioning (PXE/iPXE, Redfish/IPMI, BMC) and/or networking fundamentals (VLANs, BGP, fabric design), or GPU/accelerator infrastructure.
- Experience with GPU cluster software stacks (NCCL, CUDA, InfiniBand/RoCE).
- Prior work at a hyperscaler, GPU cloud, or datacenter-scale infrastructure organization.
- Systems programming in Rust or Go.
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.
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.
How we rate this
Senior or Staff Software Engineer, Inference / Compute Infrastructure Engineering at Together AI rates 97 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
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical software engineer figure when pay comes up. 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 Cursor in your day-to-day work.
- What are the limits of Elevenlabs that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
- What's a project where you used Decagon hands-on?
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Fine-tuning, Cursor, Elevenlabs, and Decagon. 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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