{"id":657365,"url":"https://alion.io/job/plaud-machine-learning-engineer-inference-serving-speech-llm-san-francisco","title":"Machine Learning Engineer, Inference & Serving (Speech LLM) - San Francisco","company":{"id":48171,"name":"Plaud","domain":"plaud.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/plaud","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":14,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.286,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":65,"computed_at":"2026-10-23T05:54:15Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":195000,"max":365000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":365000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"GDPR","optional":false},{"name":"HIPAA","optional":false},{"name":"ISO 27001","optional":false},{"name":"KV Cache","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"SGLang","optional":false},{"name":"SOC 2","optional":false},{"name":"TensorRT-LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Triton Inference Server","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"AWQ","optional":true},{"name":"GPTQ","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"Post-training","optional":true},{"name":"Quantization","optional":true},{"name":"Speculative Decoding","optional":true},{"name":"Speech Recognition","optional":true},{"name":"TensorRT","optional":true},{"name":"WebRTC","optional":true},{"name":"WebSockets","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-05-08T06:58:22Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-05-08","last_verified_at":"2026-10-23T10:49:48Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":168,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":167},"description":"About Plaud Inc.\nPlaud is building the real-world AI interface for professionals to amplify intelligence, elevate productivity and performance, loved by over 2,500,000 users worldwide since 2023. With a mission to amplify human intelligence, Plaud captures, structures, and compounds the intelligence generated in conversations - so humans can think better, decide faster, and execute with clarity.\nPlaud Inc. is a Delaware-incorporated, San Francisco-based company pushing the boundary of human-AI intelligence through a hardware-software combination. With full ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2, GDPR, EN18031, and HIPAA compliances, Plaud is committed to the highest standards of data security and privacy protection.\nTo learn more about Plaud, please visithttps://www.Plaud.ai and follow along on Instagram, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube\nWhy You Should Join Us\nPlaud is building the next generation intelligence infrastructure and interfaces to capture, extract, and utilize intelligence from what people say, hear, see, and think.\nPlaud is a bootstrapped, skyrocketing, profitable company with a $300M revenue run rate achieved in just three years.\n\nDefine the next-gen paradigm for human-AI interaction.\n\nGain exposure to cutting-edge AI for Pro tools and play a direct role in our global expansion.\n\nWork with passionate teammates who value innovation, collaboration, and customer success.\n\nGrow your career in a culture that champions continuous learning and fast career development.\n\nMarket-competitive compensation, global exposure, and a vibrant, creativity-fueled work atmosphere.\n\nYou may be a good fit if you:\nHave hands-on experience building and deploying high-throughput, ultra-low-latency inference engines for large language models or foundational speech models.\n\nUnderstand the intricate tradeoffs between latency, throughput, and Time-To-First-Token (or Time-To-First-Audio) in real-time streaming environments.\n\nHave practical experience with continuous batching, KV cache management (e.g., PagedAttention), and stateful connections necessary for real-time conversational AI.\n\nPossess a deep understanding of GPU architectures (NVIDIA Ampere/Hopper) and the memory hierarchy, allowing you to identify and eliminate hardware bottlenecks.\n\nCommunicate clearly and collaborate effectively, as you will sit at the critical intersection between the core ML training team and the backend infrastructure team.\n\nThrive in fast-moving environments and genuinely enjoy the systems-engineering challenge of squeezing every last drop of performance out of a cluster of GPUs.\n\nAre obsessed with building AI systems that natively understand and generate speech, ultimately creating a hardware-software AI companion that amplifies human productivity.\n\nStrong candidates may also have experience with:\nFrontier Serving Frameworks: Deep, under-the-hood familiarity with modern LLM serving frameworks like vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang, or NVIDIA Triton Inference Server (bonus points for active open-source contributions to these repositories).\n\nReal-Time Audio Streaming: Experience handling continuous audio streams over WebSockets or WebRTC, deploying neural audio codecs, and managing chunked audio generation to minimize conversational latency.\n\nAdvanced Inference Techniques: Implementing cutting-edge generation algorithms such as speculative decoding, lookahead decoding, or chunked prefill.\n\nModel Compression & Quantization: Hands-on experience with post-training quantization (PTQ), deploying models in FP8, INT8, AWQ, or GPTQ, without degrading audio naturalness or ASR accuracy.\n\nLarge-Scale Distributed Systems: Deploying multi-GPU (Tensor Parallelism) and multi-node inference pipelines, and managing autoscaling infrastructure using Kubernetes.\n\nWhat We Offer\nFounding Team Initiative: Opportunity to be an early, foundational member of our core SpeechLLM lab, with meaningful ownership and impact on a fast-growing startup.\n\nCompetitive Compensation: $195K - $365K base salary + performance bonus + Equity.\n\nComprehensive Benefits: Top-tier healthcare for employees and dependents, including dental and vision, and a generous employer subsidy.\n\nRetirement Planning: 401(k) plan for full-time employees with company matching.\n\nPaid Time Off: Unlimited PTO, plus 13 paid holidays.\n\nNew Parent Leave: 12 weeks of paid time off to spend time with your new family, regardless of gender.\n\nHybrid Office: Minimum of 3x in-office per week to foster highly collaborative, fast-paced research.\n\nGear & Perks: Choice of top-of-the-line laptops/workstations, annual offsites, and a fully stocked office.\n\nPlaud is and will continue to be an equal opportunity employer. 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