Member of Technical Staff - Model Serving / API Backend Engineer
Hybrid (San Francisco)$180k - $300kfull-timePosted 10mo ago
About the role
Role focused on bridging research breakthroughs and production systems for model serving and API backend, turning research checkpoints into production-ready inference services, optimizing latency and throughput, and building scalable serving architectures.
Responsibilities
- Turn research checkpoints into production-ready inference services
- Design and maintain high-performance APIs serving millions of requests
- Optimize inference latency and throughput across GPU infrastructure
- Build scalable serving architectures that handle unpredictable traffic
- Improve reliability, monitoring, and observability across model-serving systems
- Prototype and ship demos that showcase new capabilities in days, not weeks
- Collaborate closely with researchers to move from idea to live endpoint rapidly
Qualifications
- Experience building and operating systems at meaningful scale
- Understanding of research prototypes vs production systems
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and make tradeoffs under real-world constraints
- Strong judgment around performance, reliability, and cost tradeoffs
- Experience scaling APIs or ML systems under load
- Comfort working in fast-moving, research-adjacent environments
- Ownership from system design through debugging and deployment
Skills
Required:API design and development for production systemsPerformance optimization for ML modelsDistributed systems and task queuesMonitoring and observability
Nice to have:Frontend demo tooling (optional)
Benefits
- Base Annual Salary: $180,000–$300,000 USD
Last updated Jul 29, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Black Forest Labs
The frontier AI research lab for visual intelligence.
Cutting-edge generative AI models from Black Forest Labs.
APIenterprise AIgenerative AIimage generationliquid-ai-recruiting-targetmodel deploymentopen weightsphoto-realistic output
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