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CoreWeave

Senior Software Engineer II, Inference

CoreWeave is hiring a Senior Software Engineer II, Inference in Sunnyvale and Bellevue, United States. It pays $182k-$242k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on CoreWeave.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
  • Pay on this posting starts 9% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
  • The posting mentions vLLM and Ray among its tools and skills.
  • CoreWeave has 303 other open roles on Level.
  • Posted in the last few days.

AI in this role

vLLMRay
CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI™. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a platform of technology, tools, and teams that enables innovators to build and scale AI with confidence. Trusted by leading AI labs, startups, and global enterprises, CoreWeave combines superior infrastructure performance with deep technical expertise to accelerate breakthroughs and turn compute into capability. Founded in 2017, CoreWeave became a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: CRWV) in March 2025. Learn more at www.coreweave.com.

About the Team

Senior engineers are area owners who lead designs, raise engineering standards, and deliver measurable improvements to latency, throughput, and reliability across multiple services. You'll partner with product, orchestration, and hardware teams to evolve our Kubernetes-native inference platform and meet strict P99 SLAs at scale.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Lead design reviews and drive architecture within the team; decompose multi-service work into clear milestones.
  • Define and own SLIs/SLOs; ensure post-incident actions land and reliability improves release-over-release.
  • Implement advanced optimizations (e.g., micro-batch schedulers, speculative decoding, KV-cache reuse) and quantify impact.
  • Strengthen incident posture: capacity planning, autoscaling policy, graceful degradation, rollback/traffic-shift strategies.
  • Mentor IC1/IC2 engineers; review cross-team designs and elevate coding/testing standards.
  • For IC4: own an area spanning multiple services and teams (e.g., request routing & adaptive scheduling, cost-per-token analytics, GPU resource isolation).

Qualifications:

  • IC3: ~3–5 years; IC4: ~5–8 years industry experience building distributed systems or cloud services.
  • Strong coding in Python or Go (C++ a plus) and deep familiarity with networked systems and performance.
  • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes at production scale, CI/CD, and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
  • Practical knowledge of inference internals: batching, caching, mixed precision (BF16/FP8), streaming token delivery.
  • Proven track record improving tail latency (P95/P99) and service reliability through metrics-driven work.
  • Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related field (or equivalent practical experience).

Preferred Skills:

  • Contributions to inference frameworks (vLLM, Triton, TensorRT-LLM, Ray Serve, TorchServe).
  • Experience with CUDA kernels, NCCL/SHARP, RDMA/NUMA, or GPU interconnect topologies.
  • Leading multi-team initiatives or partnering with customers on mission-critical launches.

Why CoreWeave?

At CoreWeave, we work hard, have fun, and move fast! We're in an exciting stage of hyper-growth that you will not want to miss out on. We're not afraid of a little chaos, and we're constantly learning. Our team cares deeply about how we build our product and how we work together, which is represented through our core values:

  • Be Curious at Your Core
  • Act Like an Owner
  • Empower Employees
  • Deliver Best-in-Class Client Experiences
  • Achieve More Together

We support and encourage an entrepreneurial outlook and independent thinking. We foster an environment that encourages collaboration and enables the development of innovative solutions to complex problems. As we get set for takeoff, the organization's growth opportunities are constantly expanding. You will be surrounded by some of the best talent in the industry, who will want to learn from you, too. Come join us!

The base salary range for this role is $182,000 to $242,000. The starting salary will be determined by job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and the market location. We strive for both market alignment and internal equity when determining compensation. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package includes a discretionary bonus, equity awards, and a comprehensive benefits program (all based on eligibility).

What We Offer

In addition to a competitive salary, we offer a variety of benefits to support your needs. The benefits below reflect our US-based offerings for full-time employees; for roles in other locations, benefits vary and are shared during the hiring process. These include:

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance - 100% paid for by CoreWeave
  • Company-paid Life Insurance
  • Voluntary supplemental life insurance
  • Short and long-term disability insurance
  • Flexible Spending Account
  • Health Savings Account
  • Tuition Reimbursement
  • Ability to Participate in Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
  • Mental Wellness Benefits through Spring Health
  • Family-Forming support provided by Carrot
  • Paid Parental Leave
  • Flexible, full-service childcare support with Kinside
  • 401(k) with a generous employer match
  • Flexible PTO
  • Catered lunch each day in our office and data center locations
  • A casual work environment
  • A work culture focused on innovative disruption

California Applicants

California Consumer Privacy Act

Equal Opportunity & Accommodations

CoreWeave is an equal opportunity employer, committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive workplace. All qualified applicants and candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, or genetic information.

As part of this commitment and consistent with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), CoreWeave will ensure that qualified applicants and candidates with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations for the hiring process, unless such accommodation would cause an undue hardship. If reasonable accommodation is needed, please contact: careers@coreweave.com.

Export Control Compliance

This position requires access to technology and/or source code subject to U.S. export control laws. Any such access will be provided only in compliance with applicable U.S. export control requirements. As part of the recruitment process, CoreWeave may request limited information reasonably necessary to assess applicable export-control requirements.

How we rate this

Senior Software Engineer II, Inference at CoreWeave rates 82 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.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ 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

vLLMRay

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$182k
Typical software engineer job
$167k

This posting starts 9% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. What's a project where you used vLLM hands-on?
  2. Walk me through how you've used Ray in your day-to-day work.
  3. How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
  4. 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: vLLM and Ray. 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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