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.

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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

$159,300 - $250,100 a year

This position may be hired at multiple levels. Final leveling is determined during the interview process based on a candidate's experience, skills, and interview outcomes, and the applicable salary range will align with the final level assigned.

Compensation is determined based on factors including experience, expertise, interview performance, and geographic location, where applicable.

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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.