Company
Photon
Annual salary
$230k – $350k/yr
Location
Palo Alto, CA
Listed
17d ago
- Experience:
- 2 to 10 years
- Workplace:
- Five days a week on-site in Palo Alto.
- Equity:
- Competitive
On-site in Palo Alto, CA.
Send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role.
Apply for a referral →The recruiter emails you before anything happens and may suggest other jobs that suit you better.
About this Role
We are looking for a Member of Technical Staff, Inference Systems with 2+ years of experience to help build a high-performance AI inference platform from the ground up. You are a systems engineer who lives and breathes inference internals, attention, KV cache, batching, scheduling, and you want to own the entire stack rather than work on a narrow slice. You'll join a small, fast-moving team building a new inference system in Rust, where every design decision is yours to shape. If you've spent time inside engines like vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM and want to do the most impactful work of your career, this is the role.
What will you be doing?
Build a new inference runtime from scratch in Rust, owning batching, scheduling, request routing, and the full serving stack.
Design and implement KV cache management, prefix caching, and optimizations that directly reduce latency and cost per token.
Scale serving across GPUs and nodes, tackling multi-GPU and multi-node challenges head-on.
Profile, benchmark, and ship performance improvements across the entire inference pipeline.
Collaborate closely with a small founding team to make core architectural decisions that define the platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I apply for the Member of Technical Staff, Inference Systems (US) role at Photon? +
Use the Apply for a referral button on this page to send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role. They'll email you to check you're interested, then put you forward for this job or others that suit you better. It's free.
What does this Photon role pay? +
The listing gives $230k – $350k/yr.
Is this role remote? +
The listing gives the location as Palo Alto, CA. Five days a week on-site in Palo Alto.
Related Roles
Browse all startup roles
Salaried roles at startups, AI companies and established businesses, all filled by referral. One application covers every role.
View all startup roles →