{"id":88391,"url":"https://alion.io/job/ollama-software-engineer-runtime","title":"Software Engineer, Runtime","company":{"id":34429,"name":"Ollama","domain":"ollama.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/ollama","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":6,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Palo Alto, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":148000,"max_usd":312000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":8485},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA Toolkit","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"MLX ML","optional":false},{"name":"Ollama","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":false},{"name":"Windows","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-09T05:47:42Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-09","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T16:05:09Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":100,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":99},"description":"Ollama is the most popular way for developers to access open models. What started as an open-source, local-first runtime is now the largest developer network in the open-model ecosystem: 8.9 million monthly active developers and over 67,000+ community-built integrations. We're backed by Y Combinator, Benchmark, 8VC, and Theory Ventures.\nOur team is small and talent dense. We're flat, low-ego, and fast-moving. We like people who are truth-seeking, passionate, design-driven, and who enjoy shipping code.\nAbout the role\nYou'll work on the heart of Ollama - the local runtime that runs open models on developers' own machines. It loads models, manages memory, drives GPU acceleration across NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and Apple Silicon (including our MLX integration), and makes all of it feel instant. You'll work in Go and C/C++ and touch the model formats and inference engines underneath, shipping to macOS, Linux, and Windows across an enormous range of hardware.\nWhat you'll do\nMake open models run fast and reliably on consumer and enterprise hardware - from a MacBook Pro to server-grade NVIDIA GPUs.\n\nOwn pieces of the runtime: model loading & scheduling memory management, quantization, GPU hardware backends.\n\nIntegrate new model architectures and quantization formats so the latest open models work on day one.\n\nImprove cold-start, time-to-first-token, and throughput\n\nPartner with model labs and hardware vendors on early access and deep integrations.\n\nShip in the open: Ollama is open source, and you'll work with the community\n\nExample projects\nAdd support for a new model family end-to-end - format parsing, weights loading, and the defaults that make it useful out of the box.\n\nCut cold-start for a popular model in half by streaming weights and lazy-loading layers.\n\nLand a new quantization format so a 70B model runs on a single consumer GPU.\n\nWire up a new GPU backend and find a 2x throughput win with kernel selection and memory tuning.\n\nImprove the \"Auto\" experience - picking the right model and settings for a machine's hardware without the user thinking about it.\n\nYou may be a fit if\nYou have strong systems fundamentals and are comfortable in Go, C, or C++\n\nYou've worked close to the metal - GPU compute, inference, game engines, databases, OS, or networking.\n\nYou care about performance and have profiled and optimized real workloads.\n\nYou're comfortable shipping to millions of users and handling the long tail of hardware and OS combinations.\n\nBonus: experience with model quantization, GPU programming (CUDA/Metal/SYCL), Apple MLX","description_format":"text","description_chars":2567,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Apple Macbook"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["LLM & Generative AI","AI Development Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-07-09T05:47:42Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":6,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.226,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":99,"expected_fill_days":22,"reasons":["conf:3","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/ollama-software-engineer-runtime","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/ollama-software-engineer-runtime.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T18:45:55Z","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":1713,"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":34429},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=34429"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Follama-software-engineer-runtime"},{"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%2Follama-software-engineer-runtime"},{"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%2Follama-software-engineer-runtime"},{"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/ollama-software-engineer-runtime\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Follama-software-engineer-runtime"}]}