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Software Engineer, Inference (AI Data Engineering)

SpaceX· Falcon and Dragon Avionics & Software Engineering
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Palo Alto, CA$135k - $210kFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Role focused on designing and optimizing large-scale AI model serving systems and inference infrastructure to support SpaceX's mission-critical applications, with ownership from distributed infrastructure to low-level optimizations and high throughput/low latency requirements.

Responsibilities

  • Develop highly reliable, high-throughput inference systems that serve the best AI models internally across SpaceX
  • Architect and implement scalable distributed infrastructure for model serving, including load balancing, auto-scaling, batch scheduling, global KV cache, and continuous batching
  • Optimize latency and throughput of model inference under real production workloads, including low-level GPU kernel work, quantization, speculative decoding, and other acceleration techniques
  • Build reliable, high-concurrency serving systems with 100% uptime, low tail latency, and excellent observability
  • Own end-to-end components such as request routing, SDK development, rate limiting, and efficient scaling for internal SpaceX AI inference platforms
  • Benchmark, fine-tune, and accelerate inference engines (e.g., SGLang, vLLM, TensorRT-LLM)
  • Develop custom tools for tracing, replaying, and resolving issues across the full stack — from orchestration down to GPU kernels
  • Create robust CI/CD infrastructure for seamless endpoint deployment, image publishing, and inference engine updates
  • Collaborate across SpaceXAI teams to integrate inference capabilities into broader systems and workflows

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, math, or scientific discipline; OR 2+ years of professional experience building software in lieu of a degree
  • Experience in designing, implementing, and maintaining reliable and horizontally scalable distributed systems
  • 1+ years of experience in full stack development or backend development with production systems
  • 1+ years of experience with Rust or C++

Skills

Required:Distributed systems design
Nice to have:LLM inference engines and serving frameworksGPU programming and optimizationsDocker, KubernetesPython, Go or similar languages

Benefits

  • comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage
  • 401(k) retirement plan
  • short and long-term disability insurance
  • life insurance
  • paid parental leave
  • stock or long-term cash awards potential
  • Employee Stock Purchase Plan
  • 3 weeks of paid vacation and 10+ paid holidays per year
  • various discounts and perks
Last updated Aug 26, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About SpaceX

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