Staff Inference Engineer
At a glance
Senior ML Platform & Ops role at Uniphore. Palo Alto · full-time.
In listing ML Platform & Ops salary
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build a runtime that adjusts context, model choice and reasoning effort to each task while tracking persistent task state
- Manage paged KV and prompt-prefix caches, including routing, eviction and offloading as permissions or model versions change
- Tune decoding, attention, batching, quantization and multi-GPU execution to improve inference performance
- Handle model and adapter serving, including resource scheduling and hot swaps without downtime
- Add production safeguards and monitoring, then make runtime deployments work across NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, cloud and on-premises setups
What you bring
- At least five years in engineering, including three or more focused on GPU systems, distributed inference or ML serving
- Production experience with vLLM, SGLang or TensorRT-LLM
- Strong Python and C++ skills, with the ability to debug CUDA C++ or HIP kernels
- Practical experience profiling GPUs and improving performance
Who this fits
This is a hands-on individual-contributor role for a senior or staff engineer working across research, model engineering, knowledge systems, agent and platform teams. The preferred location is Palo Alto, California.
From the employer
Uniphore is the Business AI company. Our sovereign, composable and secure AI platform connects enterprise data, fine-tunes AI models and deploys agentic AI across the enterprise. We empower every worker to boost productivity and help businesses grow faster, operate smarter and reduce costs. Trusted by more than 2,000 businesses globally, and recognized on the Deloitte Fast 500, Uniphore delivers on the promise of AI as a transformative force for business.
Job Description:
Staff Inference Engineer –
Uniphore is building an enterprise AI pla4orm where agents operate across voice, video, text, and structured data in real time. We are looking for a Senior or Staff Inference Engineer to own the inference layer — combining deep model inference expertise with systems engineering to deliver a context-aware runtime serving finetuned SLMs across cloud, on-premises, and widely used GPU platforms.
This is a hands-on individual contributor role working closely with Uniphore’s research, model engineering, knowledge systems, agent, and pla4orm teams.
What You Will Build
Context-aware runtime: Integrate context selection, compression, conversation compaction, and persistent task state with model execution. Adapt context budgets, model selection, and reasoning effort to each task.
KV-cache and computation optimization: Build paged KV-cache and prompt-prefix-cache management, cache-aware routing, retention, eviction, and offloading. Preserve correctness as context, permissions, model versions, and adapters change.
Inference performance: Implement and tune speculative decoding, attention kernels, continuous batching, quantization, chunked prefill, and multi-GPU parallel execution.
SLM and adapter lifecycle: Build model and adapter lifecycle management, multi-adapter serving, zero-downtime hot swapping, and resource scheduling.
Production reliability: Implement observability (DCGM, Prometheus, Grafana), tenant isolation, overload protection, failure recovery, and safe rollout and rollback.
Cross-environment deployment: Build portable runtime integrations across NVIDIA and AMD GPU pla4orms, cloud and on-premises environments, and single- or multi-GPU configurations.
Technical Expertise
Model inference internals: Autoregressive generation, prefill vs. decoding, attention architectures, compute- vs. memory-bound execution, numerical precision.
Speculative decoding: Draft-and-verify execution, acceptance/rejection sampling, adaptive speculation, and throughput tradeoffs.
GPU kernels: Flash attention-style kernels, tiling, operator fusion, memory access patterns.
CUDA, HIP, Triton, or CUTLASS proficiency.
KV and prefix caching: Paged KV storage, fragmentation, cache quantization, offloading, cross request prefix reuse, tenant isolation.
Context-window management: Token budgeting, context selection, prompt compression, conversation compaction, sliding window and sparse attention.
Serving and scaling: Continuous batching, chunked prefill, admission control, quantization, multi-GPU parallelism, prefill/decode disaggregation.
Qualifications Required:
• 5+ years engineering, including 3+ years hands-on with GPU systems, distributed inference, or ML serving
• Production experience with vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM
• Strong Python and C++ (C++17/20); ability to read and debug CUDA C++ or HIP kernels
• Hands-on GPU profiling and performance optimization
Preferred:
• Custom GPU kernel development (CUDA, HIP, Triton, CUTLASS)
• PyTorch internals — torch. Compile, custom operators, MoE or disaggregated
prefill/decode
• LoRA/SLM adapter serving and zero-downtime hot swapping
• NVIDIA and AMD Instinct hardware in production
• Telemetry with DCGM, AMD SMI, Prometheus, and Grafana
Comp range/OTE: 190- 240K USD
Hiring Pay Range:
$200,000 - $350,000
Benefits:
In addition to competitive base pay, this position also includes an annual incentive opportunity based on target achievement, pre-IPO stock options, benefits including medical, dental, vision, 401(k) with a match, and more, plus generous paid time off, paid holidays, paid day off for your birthday and other paid leave policies to support employees through all phases of life.
Location preference:
Uniphore is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity in the workplace. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics.
For more information on how Uniphore uses AI to unify—and humanize—every enterprise experience, please visit www.uniphore.com.