Staff Software Engineer, Inference

What You'll Do:

CoreWeave’s Inference team builds and operates the core cloud platform powering massive-scale GPU workloads for AI/ML, VFX, rendering, and real-time inference. Our stack is engineered for speed, scale, and cost efficiency—providing a powerful alternative to traditional hyperscalers. Infrastructure is our product, and we operate it at massive scale to power the most demanding workloads.

About the role: 

As a Staff Software Engineer (IC5) on the Inference team, you will operate as a technical leader across multiple teams and services, driving architecture, performance, and reliability for CoreWeave’s Kubernetes-native inference platform. You will define and lead complex, cross-cutting design initiatives spanning request routing, adaptive scheduling, GPU resource management, and cost-per-token optimization under strict P99 SLAs. This high-impact role requires you to implement advanced inference optimizations—such as speculative decoding and KV-cache reuse—while establishing performance benchmarking frameworks, guiding cross-functional alignment across infrastructure boundaries, and raising the bar for engineering rigor and observability practices.

Who You Are:

• ~8–12+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems or cloud platforms.
• Proven track record of leading cross-team or organization-level technical initiatives at scale.
• Strong coding skills in Go, Python, or C++.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes at production scale, including orchestration, scheduling, and service design.
• Strong understanding of networked systems, performance optimization, and distributed system design.
• Hands-on engineering experience with inference systems, including batching/micro-batching strategies, caching, memory optimization, mixed precision (BF16/FP8), and streaming token delivery.
• Demonstrated ability to systematically improve tail latency (P95/P99) and platform reliability through metrics-driven engineering.
• Experienced in owning system-wide SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, autoscaling strategies, and mentoring senior and mid-level engineers.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

Preferred:

• Direct open-source or production contributions to modern inference frameworks such as vLLM, Triton, TensorRT-LLM, Ray Serve, or TorchServe.
• Deep experience with GPU systems engineering and hardware performance optimization (CUDA, NCCL, RDMA, NUMA, or GPU interconnects).
• Direct exposure to large-scale AI/ML infrastructure or hyperscale cloud environments.

Wondering if you're a good fit? 

We believe in investing in our people, and value candidates who can bring their own diversified experiences to our teams even if you aren't a 100% skill or experience match. Here are a few qualities we've found compatible with our team. If some of this describes you, we'd love to talk.

• You love to scale highly complex distributed architectures and mentor engineering cohorts to elevate technical standards across an organization.
• You're curious about pioneering low-latency inference optimizations and finding innovative shortcuts to optimize cost-per-token performance.
• You're an expert in metrics-driven engineering, troubleshooting micro-bottlenecks, and delivering stable cloud platforms under strict multi-tenant constraints.

Why CoreWeave?

At CoreWeave, we work hard, have fun, and move fast! We're in an exciting stage of hyper-growth that you will not want to miss out on. We're not afraid of a little chaos, and we're constantly learning. Our team cares deeply about how we build our product and how we work together, which is represented through our core values:

• Be Curious at Your Core
• Act Like an Owner
• Empower Employees
• Deliver Best-in-Class Client Experiences
• Achieve More Together

We support and encourage an entrepreneurial outlook and independent thinking. We foster an environment that encourages collaboration and enables the development of innovative solutions to complex problems. As we get set for takeoff, the organisation's growth opportunities are constantly expanding. You will be surrounded by some of the best talent in the industry, who will want to learn from you, too. Come join us!

The base salary range for this role is £116,000 to £155,000. The starting salary will be determined based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and market location. We strive for both market alignment and internal equity when determining compensation. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package includes a discretionary bonus, equity awards, and a comprehensive benefits program (all based on eligibility).