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DDN via Ashby

Senior/Staff AI Engineer

lead California
still open verified 2d ago posted 45d ago checked just now
Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com

This is the employer's own posting, not a copy on a job board.

What we know

Is it still open?

Confirmed still open

Last checked 2d ago — checked against the employer's own applicant tracking system, which is the company answering directly.

We re-read the employer's own applicant tracking system and the posting was still there. That is the company answering directly.

Check this listing's status as JSON

How old is it?

Posted 45d ago

The date the source published, not the day we noticed it (2026-07-31). Last seen at its source just now.

Is it remote?

Remote - California

That is the location the employer filed this posting under. Quoted as written — we do not re-word the source's own location.

Who may apply?

California

The description states no restriction of its own. This is the source's own tag.

Pay not stated

Similar roles pay $196.0k–255.7k/yr

Middle 50% of 551 listings that do state pay — Engineering · Lead · United States · USD/year. This employer has published no salary; this is what comparable listings we hold disclose, never converted between currencies or periods. How this is calculated.

Skills named in the ad

LLMMLOpsPrompt EngineeringRAG

Recognised terms only, from a fixed vocabulary — this is what CV matching compares against.

Carried by 1 source

The listing

What you’ll do

  • Build and optimize LLM serving and inference systems for production environments

  • Improve performance across GPU and CPU pathways

  • Work on KV cache, memory, storage, and throughput bottlenecks

  • Design and scale systems that support RAG and retrieval-heavy AI workloads

  • Contribute to infrastructure where storage architecture and systems efficiency materially affect AI performance

  • Solve engineering problems at the intersection of AI, high-performance systems, and distributed infrastructure

What we’re looking for

  • An engineer who has spent meaningful time building or optimizing production AI systems, not just experimenting with models

  • Someone who understands how inference performance is shaped by the interaction between compute, memory, storage, and serving architecture

  • Deep hands-on experience working close to the systems layer — for example, improving how workloads run across GPU and CPU resources, reducing bottlenecks, or tuning infrastructure for better throughput and latency

  • Evidence of real ownership in areas like model serving, retrieval, caching, storage, or distributed performance, rather than purely application-layer AI work

  • The ability to move comfortably between architecture decisions and hands-on implementation, especially in environments where efficiency and scale matter

  • A background that suggests you can operate in technically demanding environments, whether that comes from AI infrastructure, high-performance systems, storage platforms, or adjacent distributed systems work

  • PhD preferred, but far less important than having built serious systems in the real world

Why this role is compelling

  • This is not a “prompt engineering” job.

  • This is not an “AI wrapper” job.

  • This is not a generic backend role with AI sprinkled on top.

  • This is a chance to work on the infrastructure that determines whether modern AI systems are fast, scalable, efficient, and commercially viable.

  • If you want to work on the real mechanics of AI performance — serving, retrieval, compute efficiency, memory behavior, storage architecture, and inference at scale — this is where that work happens.

Who will love this role

  • Engineers who enjoy deep systems problems

  • Builders who care about performance, scale, and architecture

  • People who want to work where AI meets infrastructure

  • Candidates who would rather solve hard technical bottlenecks than ship surface-level AI features

Who should not apply

This role is not for:

  • Purely academic researchers without meaningful production ownership

  • Generic software engineers without clear AI systems or inference depth

  • Candidates focused mainly on prompt engineering or lightweight application integrations

  • MLOps generalists who have not worked deeply on serving, storage, or performance-critical AI systems

Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com