{"id":177879,"url":"https://alion.io/job/azx-senior-software-engineer-ai-inference-runtime-platform","title":"Senior Software Engineer (AI Inference & Runtime Platform)","company":{"id":9868,"name":"AZX","domain":"azx.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/azx","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Seattle, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":140000,"max":230000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":230000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Bicep","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Karpenter","optional":false},{"name":"KEDA","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Least Privilege","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Neo4j","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTofu","optional":false},{"name":"pgvector","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Qdrant","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"SGLang","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-30T23:13:24Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-30","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T15:20:19Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":47,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":47},"description":"About AZX\nOur mission is to accelerate positive impact in critical industries through AI transformation. We specialize in physics-informed ML and enterprise AI solutions that directly address climate and sustainability challenges.\nWe’re growing quickly and already work with category-leaders in real estate (CBRE), energy (LevelTen Energy), logistics (Flexe) and utilities.\nWe bootstrapped profitably for our first year and are now backed by leading investors focused on AI, climate and energy.\nWe work on challenges in clean energy, decarbonization, climate risk, energy systems, and global economics. We’re building our company for long-term success and aim to create the ultimate place to work for those passionate about AI and making a positive impact.\nAbout This Role:\nYou will be responsible for owning the layer where AI work physically happens: the machines, the isolation boundary, and the models running on them. This role anchors on two systems. The first is our inference control plane - open-weight models and custom task-model zoos, hosted and operated across managed GPU clouds and customer-managed Kubernetes clusters, with scale-to-zero economics, cold-start discipline, and per-token cost accounting that stays correct even when a client disconnects mid-stream - along with the Kubernetes layer those workloads live on: operators, autoscaling, node lifecycle. The second is our agent-sandboxing platform: hardware-isolated microVMs for running untrusted, agent-generated code securely and compliantly by construction, where agents operate with least privilege, never see a credential, and a human gates anything that writes to a system of record. You'll write Rust in the morning, a Kubernetes controller after lunch, and a FastAPI control-plane endpoint before you go home - building the fork engine, the guest agent, and the multi-substrate model lifecycle. We're looking for individuals who've built this class of stack (an inference-serving or serverless-GPU platform), operated it hard at scale, or ideally both.\nResponsibilities:\nManage the serving tier for open-weight models: engine deployment and configuration, cold-start strategy, per-model SLOs, and upgrade/canary discipline.\n\nAdminister the Kubernetes layer for inference and sandbox workloads: operators and CRDs, autoscaling (KEDA/Karpenter-class), GPU scheduling and sharing, and node lifecycle.\n\nOwn the stateful data plane end to end with restore procedures that are regularly tested.\n\nOversee the sandbox runtime and its host-side control plane: lifecycle, exec, snapshot/fork, teardown, metering, and the threat model of the isolation boundary.\n\nDirect the FastAPI control-plane services, Terraform/OpenTofu, Bicep, and the dashboards\n\nRun the layer the backend services team builds on, expect to debug into their services, and expect them to read your dashboards.\n\nManage the open-source posture: build to OSS standards and release as it matures, with reviewed PRs, real docs, and reproducible builds.\n\nCore Qualifications\n5+ years of shipping production systems in a systems language. Rust is the house language, but polyglots are welcome - deep Go, C/C++, or Zig with genuine appetite for Rust counts. Async runtimes, memory-safety discipline, and debugging at the syscall boundary should be familiar territory.\n\nOperated Kubernetes workloads that other people depended on - controllers or operators, scheduling, autoscaling, node lifecycle. You've been paged, and the experience changed how you build.\n\nStrong ability to threat-model isolation boundaries (namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, hypervisors), including identifying what an untrusted guest could observe, forge, or exhaust, and applying security best practices for agentic execution - least privilege, no credentials in the sandbox, audit trails, and human approval on write actions.\n\nHands-on experience deploying or operating open-weight LLM serving infrastructure (vLLM/SGLang or similar), including packaging models into reliable, metered production endpoints.\n\nPerformance discipline in distributed systems: you measure before you optimize, and you can tell the story of a latency you killed with the numbers attached.\n\nPractical depth in some of our core stack - Rust (tokio), Python/FastAPI, Kubernetes operators (controller-runtime/Kubebuilder/CRDs), KEDA, Karpenter, GPU device plugins/DRA - with a genuine willingness to research your way into the rest.\n\nFamiliarity with isolation technology (Firecracker, Kata, gVisor, or comparable), secrets management and egress control (Vault/KMS-class), and hosting stateful systems (vector stores like pgvector/Qdrant, graph stores like Neo4j) with backup and failover discipline.\n\nComfort operating across cloud and GPU substrates - AWS/Azure/GCP plus managed GPU clouds - using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/OpenTofu, Bicep) and observability tooling (OpenTelemetry).\n\nBachelor's Degree; Master's is a plus\n\nWhy AZX! \nBe part of a fast-growing, profitable, mission-driven company with industry-leading clients tackling the massive opportunity of AI transformation in critical industries.\n\nCompetitive early-stage startup compensation (based on capabilities, experience, and location)\n\nBonus eligibility\n\nHealth insurance with meaningful coverage for dependents\n\nFlexible paid time off\n\nEquity\n\nFully remote culture with a cluster of teammates in Seattle\n\nAdditional Information:\nMust be able to travel 2x/year for company summits\n\nApplicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.\n\nWe are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment visas at this time.\n\nPlease note that our interview process includes a written take-home assignment followed by a live two-hour technical session with our engineering team, so if that format isn't a good fit, we'd ask that you not apply\n\nPlease only apply to a maximum of 2 roles at a time, any applicants who apply to more then 2 roles within a 6 month period will automatically be disqualified\n\nNext Steps:\nIf this job sounds like a great fit but you don’t check ALL of these qualification boxes, we’d still love to hear from you!","description_format":"text","description_chars":6125,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":true},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Health insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI Agents","Custom Software Development","AI Consulting & Integration"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-31T01:50:14Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":26,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":0.4,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":47,"expected_fill_days":58,"reasons":["seen:47","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":230000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/azx-senior-software-engineer-ai-inference-runtime-platform","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/azx-senior-software-engineer-ai-inference-runtime-platform.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T18:12:54Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":883,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":9868},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=9868"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fazx-senior-software-engineer-ai-inference-runtime-platform"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fazx-senior-software-engineer-ai-inference-runtime-platform"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fazx-senior-software-engineer-ai-inference-runtime-platform"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/azx-senior-software-engineer-ai-inference-runtime-platform\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fazx-senior-software-engineer-ai-inference-runtime-platform"}]}