Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Inference & Performance

About Egen: Egen is a fast-growing and entrepreneurial company with a data-first mindset. We bring together the best engineering talent working with the most advanced technology platforms, including Google Cloud and Salesforce, to help clients drive action and impact through data and insights. We are committed to being a place where the best people choose to work so they can apply their engineering and technology expertise to envision what is next for how data and platforms can change the world for the better. We are dedicated to learning, thrive on solving tough problems, and continually innovate to achieve fast, effective results. If this describes you, we want you on our team. Want to learn more about life at Egen? Check out these resources in addition to the job description. Meet Egen Life at Egen Culture and Values at Egen Career Development at Egen Benefits at Egen About the opportunity: As a Senior AI Engineer, you will be at the forefront of our Generative AI initiatives. We treat AI as a software engineering discipline. You will be responsible for the full lifecycle of our AI features—specifically document intelligence and RAG pipelines—taking them from initial prototype to robust, scalable production services. You will solve for real-world constraints like latency, error handling, and cost optimization. You’ll collaborate with a diverse range of clients to translate business needs into high-performance AI architectures. This role requires a blend of deep technical expertise in LLMs and a disciplined Software Engineering approach to ensure our solutions are robust, ethical, and scalable. What You Will Do:

• Optimize Inference: Build and tune production LLM serving with vLLM and SGLang—maximizing throughput and minimizing latency through batching, paged attention, quantization, and KV-cache strategies
• Profile & Accelerate Training: Instrument and profile training runs to find bottlenecks, then resolve them with the right attention implementations (e.g. FlashAttention) tuned to the underlying hardware (H200, GB200)
• Engineer for the Hardware: Apply a working understanding of GPU architecture and attention internals to choose the right approach per accelerator, rather than relying on defaults
• Serve at Scale: Deploy and operate multiple models within shared GPU clusters on GKE, with autoscaling, efficient bin-packing, and graceful handling of mixed workloads
• Drive Efficiency: Own GPU utilization as a first-class metric—measure it, improve throughput-per-dollar, and continuously raise the ceiling on what our fleet can deliver
• Collaborate & Consult: Work directly with clients to understand performance, latency, and cost requirements, and translate them into pragmatic serving and training architectures

Your Technical Toolkit:

• Core Languages: Mastery of Python and shell scripting; comfort reading and reasoning about lower-level (CUDA-adjacent) performance code is a strong plus
• Inference Frameworks: Hands-on experience with vLLM, SGLash, or comparable high-performance serving stacks
• GPU & Model Internals: Solid grasp of GPU architecture, the fundamentals of LLM inference, and the attention mechanism—including where the bottlenecks live and how FlashAttention and similar techniques address them across hardware generations (H200, GB200)
• Profiling: Fluency with profiling tools to diagnose training and inference bottlenecks (compute-bound vs. memory-bound, kernel-level analysis)
• Infrastructure: Strong Kubernetes (GKE) experience—deploying and autoscaling multiple models on shared GPU clusters on Google Cloud
• Mindset: A strong software engineering foundation—you write clean, maintainable code, measure before optimizing, and understand the full SDLC

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
• 5+ years of experience in ML/AI engineering, with a meaningful portion focused on performance, infrastructure, or systems
• Proven track record of deploying and optimizing models in a production environment
• Demonstrated experience profiling and improving GPU utilization for training and/or inference
• Experience with Classic Machine Learning (neural nets, training, tuning) is a strong plus
• Knowledge of Data Engineering and SQL

Personal Attributes:

• Ownership: You take pride in your work and see optimizations through from profile to production
• Curiosity: Hardware and serving frameworks change fast; you are a lifelong learner who stays ahead of the curve
• Rigor: You measure before you optimize and let data, not intuition, guide where you spend effort
• Consultative Spirit: You enjoy interacting with clients and can translate technical complexity into business value
• Ethics: You prioritize responsible AI development and data privacy

Compensation & Benefits: This role is eligible for our competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package to support your well-being: - Comprehensive Health Insurance - Paid Leave (Vacation/PTO) - Paid Holidays - Sick Leave - Parental Leave - Bereavement Leave - 401 (k) Employer Match - Employee Referral Bonuses Check out our complete list of benefits here - >https://egen.ai/people/#benefits Important: All roles are subject to standard hiring verification practices, which may include background checks, employment verification, and other relevant checks. EEO and Accommodations: Egen is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to inclusion, diversity, and equity in the workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veterans’ status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. Egen will also consider qualified applications with criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Egen welcomes and encourages applications from individuals with disabilities. Reasonable accommodations are available for candidates during all aspects of the selection process. Please advise the talent acquisition team if you require accommodations during the interview process.