hirly
Likely filled

This role has closed. DDN has taken the posting down.

hirly last saw it live on 1 October 2026. See similar open roles below, or browse the live board.

DDN

Senior/Staff AI Engineer

Remote - California

hirly's read of this role

Seniority
Lead / management
Country
US
Work mode
On-site / unstated
First seen by hirly
28 Sept 2026

Derived automatically from the posting.

the posting

What you’ll do

Build and optimize LLM serving and inference systems for production environments

Improve performance across GPU and CPU pathways

Work on KV cache, memory, storage, and throughput bottlenecks

Design and scale systems that support RAG and retrieval-heavy AI workloads

Contribute to infrastructure where storage architecture and systems efficiency materially affect AI performance

Solve engineering problems at the intersection of AI, high-performance systems, and distributed infrastructure

What we’re looking for

An engineer who has spent meaningful time building or optimizing production AI systems, not just experimenting with models

Someone who understands how inference performance is shaped by the interaction between compute, memory, storage, and serving architecture

Deep hands-on experience working close to the systems layer — for example, improving how workloads run across GPU and CPU resources, reducing bottlenecks, or tuning infrastructure for better throughput and latency

Evidence of real ownership in areas like model serving, retrieval, caching, storage, or distributed performance, rather than purely application-layer AI work

The ability to move comfortably between architecture decisions and hands-on implementation, especially in environments where efficiency and scale matter

A background that suggests you can operate in technically demanding environments, whether that comes from AI infrastructure, high-performance systems, storage platforms, or adjacent distributed systems work

PhD preferred, but far less important than having built serious systems in the real world

Why this role is compelling

This is not a “prompt engineering” job.

This is not an “AI wrapper” job.

This is not a generic backend role with AI sprinkled on top.

This is a chance to work on the infrastructure that determines whether modern AI systems are fast, scalable, efficient, and commercially viable.

If you want to work on the real mechanics of AI performance — serving, retrieval, compute efficiency, memory behavior, storage architecture, and inference at scale — this is where that work happens.

Who will love this role

Engineers who enjoy deep systems problems

Builders who care about performance, scale, and architecture

People who want to work where AI meets infrastructure

Candidates who would rather solve hard technical bottlenecks than ship surface-level AI features

Who should not apply

This role is not for:

Purely academic researchers without meaningful production ownership

Generic software engineers without clear AI systems or inference depth

Candidates focused mainly on prompt engineering or lightweight application integrations

MLOps generalists who have not worked deeply on serving, storage, or performance-critical AI systems

Original posting on DDN's site ↗