AI Researcher — Inference Optimization at Featherless AI

Role Overview

We are seeking an AI Researcher with deep experience in inference optimization to design, evaluate, and deploy high-performance inference systems for large-scale machine learning models. You will work at the intersection of model architecture, systems engineering, and hardware-aware optimization, improving latency, throughput, and cost efficiency across real-world production environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Research and develop techniques to optimize inference performance for large neural networks.

• Improve latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and cost per inference.

• Design and evaluate model-level optimizations (quantization, pruning, KV-cache optimization, architecture-aware simplifications).

• Implement systems-level optimizations (dynamic batching, kernel fusion, multi-GPU inference, prefill vs decode optimization).

• Benchmark inference workloads across hardware accelerators.

• Collaborate with engineering teams to deploy optimized inference pipelines.

• Translate research insights into production-ready improvements.

Required Qualifications

• Strong background in machine learning, deep learning, or AI systems.

• Hands-on experience optimizing inference for large-scale models.

• Proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch).

• Experience with inference tooling (e.g., Triton, TensorRT, vLLM, ONNX Runtime).

• Ability to design experiments and communicate results clearly.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Experience deploying production inference systems at scale.

• Familiarity with distributed and multi-GPU inference.

• Experience contributing to open-source ML or inference frameworks.

• Authorship or co-authorship of peer-reviewed research papers in machine learning, systems, or related fields.

• Experience working close to hardware (CUDA, ROCm, profiling tools).

What Success Looks Like

• Measurable gains in latency, throughput, and cost efficiency.

• Optimized inference systems running reliably in production.

• Research ideas successfully translated into deployable systems.

• Clear benchmarks and documentation that inform product decisions.

Relevant Research Areas (Bonus)

• Long-context inference optimization

• Speculative decoding

• KV-cache compression and paging

• Efficient decoding strategies

• Hardware-aware inference design