[Junior / Senior / Staff] Software Engineer, Inference / Compute Infrastructure Engineering
Company websitetogether.ai (Together AI, opens in new tab)
Base salary $160K to $280K
Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in San Francisco, CA
You apply on the employer's own site. Six Figure Work does not handle applications.
- LocationSan Francisco, CA
- WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
- Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
- Last checked (3 h ago) · observed since
About this job
About the Role
We're looking for a software engineer to build the Kubernetes-native control plane that provisions and runs our GPU inference fleet. You'll design a manifest-driven API where the inference team declares what they need, whether that's a cluster, a model deployment, or a capacity change, and our controllers handle the reconciliation, provider/runtime selection, and lifecycle management underneath, so the inference team never has to know or care which specific serving stack, scheduler, or hardware pool is doing the work. You'll also build the systems that keep the fleet efficient, not just running, including defragmentation and rebalancing logic that consolidates scattered workloads back into contiguous capacity, and scheduling/bin-packing improvements that push GPU utilization up without hurting latency.
The core value we're after is decoupling the people building on top of the platform from the operational and runtime complexity underneath, while squeezing more usable capacity out of the same hardware. You'll build the controllers, reconciliation loops, and self-service surface (API/CLI, not tickets) that make that decoupling real, plus the event-driven health, remediation, and utilization systems that keep it running and efficient without a human in the loop. Strong candidates have hands-on experience with Kubernetes controller/CRD patterns, have built or operated a platform API that abstracts multiple backends behind one interface, understand GPU scheduling and capacity efficiency (fragmentation, bin-packing, right-sizing), and think about GPU infrastructure as software to be engineered.
A product mindset - you've built internal platforms or APIs consumed by other engineering teams and care about the developer experience of what you ship.You build it, you own it. You are not only responsible for delivering the software but also for operating and supporting it in production.
Responsibilities
- Build the provisioning state machine: design and implement the software that models the full lifecycle of a physical host from discovery, inference bring-up to GPU driver/CUDA stack, health validation, and decommission/RMA — as explicit, versioned states and transitions.
- Build the self-service API: design declarative APIs and a control plane so the inference team can request, scale, and tear down inference clusters with one API call — no ticket, no human in the loop.
- Automate self-healing: detect degraded or failed nodes, drain them safely, trigger repair or replacement, and reintroduce healthy capacity into the pool automatically.
- Own reliability of the pipeline: idempotency, retries, rollback, and drift detection so the provisioning system is as dependable as any other production service.
- Partner with the inference/ML platform team: understand the cluster shapes they need — topology, interconnect, scheduling constraints — and encode them as first-class abstractions in the platform.
- Engineer it like software: strong typing, automated tests, code review, versioning, and CI/CD for infrastructure code — this is a product, not a collection of Ansible playbooks.
Requirements
Core requirements (all levels):
- Strong software engineering background in Go, Python, Rust, or similar — you write and test real software for a living.
- Experience with durable workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal, Cadence, or equivalent to run long-lived, manifest-driven workflows that survive failures and resume mid-execution.
- Experience building software control planes or orchestration systems that model state and reconcile it over time (e.g., Kubernetes controllers/operators, custom reconciliation loops, workflow engines).
- Experience with event-driven systems — designing and building software around message queues, event streams, or pub/sub (e.g., Kafka, NATS, SQS) rather than polling or cron-driven scripts.
- A product mindset. You’ve built internal platforms or APIs consumed by other engineering teams and care about the developer experience of what you ship.
Nice to have:
- Exposure to bare-metal provisioning (PXE/iPXE, Redfish/IPMI, BMC) and/or networking fundamentals (VLANs, BGP, fabric design), or GPU/accelerator infrastructure.
- Experience with GPU cluster software stacks (NCCL, CUDA, InfiniBand/RoCE).
- Prior work at a hyperscaler, GPU cloud, or datacenter-scale infrastructure organization.
- Systems programming in Rust or Go.
About Together AI
Together AI, the AI Native Cloud, is purpose-built for AI engineers. AI application developers get high-performance inference that scales reliably, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for creating frontier-level specialized models, and pre-training at massive scale for fully custom intelligence, all around a marketplace of leading open models that teams can run, adapt, and own. Trusted by Cursor, Decagon, ElevenLabs, Salesforce, and Zoom, Together serves 400+ trillion tokens a month.
Compensation
We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance and other competitive benefits. The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $160,000 - $280,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.
Application Policy
Please read each role carefully and apply to the position best suited to you. Candidates are limited to 6 applications within a 90-day period, and applications beyond that limit will be automatically rejected. You may apply to additional roles 90 days after your last application.
Equal Opportunity
Together AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and more.
Please see our privacy policy at https://www.together.ai/privacy.
Source: Together AI on Greenhouse · View original posting (opens in new tab)
Pay in context
This role's base floor ($160,000) is above 34% of the 4,307 Software Engineering roles in California listed on this site; 106 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $176,000; the middle half runs from $149,100 to $203,500.
Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 7, 2026.
This listing[Junior / Senior / Staff] Software Engineer, Inference / Compute Infrastructure Engineering$160K to $280K
(Senior/Junior AI Inference Reliability Engineer, Compute Infra$160K to $280K
Senior Product Engineer$160K to $230K
Technical Support Engineer (GPU Clusters) - US Weekends$160K to $230K
Senior Software Engineer - Together Cloud Platform$160K to $230K
Senior Recruiter, GTM & Business$165K to $210K
Senior Recruiter, G&A$165K to $210K
Chart as a table
| Role | Published base |
|---|---|
| [Junior / Senior / Staff] Software Engineer, Inference / Compute Infrastructure Engineering (this listing) | $160K - $280K |
| (Senior/Junior AI Inference Reliability Engineer, Compute Infra | $160K - $280K |
| Senior Product Engineer | $160K - $230K |
| Technical Support Engineer (GPU Clusters) - US Weekends | $160K - $230K |
| Senior Software Engineer - Together Cloud Platform | $160K - $230K |
| Senior Recruiter, GTM & Business | $165K - $210K |
| Senior Recruiter, G&A | $165K - $210K |
Observed changes
- First observed on the employer's board
- Began meeting the published-salary criteria
- Observed since
- Employer-stated posting date
- 2026-07-16
Where this pay comes from
Location as the employer wrote it: San Francisco
We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance and other competitive benefits. The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $160,000 - $280,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by lo
- Method
- Employer text, read with fixed rules and re-verified
- Checked
- Rule set
- us-base-v2
The pay passage appears in the employer's own job text. Fixed, deterministic rules located it, and the passage below was checked against the stored copy of the posting.
What we verified
- The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
- The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
- The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.
We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.
