LLMOps Engineer

Job Description

Responsibilities

• Own the production LLM serving stack across vLLM, SGLang, and NVIDIA Dynamo
• Tune the serving path end to end
• Design and operate disaggregated prefill/decode and multi-node deployments
• Run inference on Kubernetes with autoscaling, rolling model updates, canary releases, and tested rollback paths
• Instrument everything that matters
• Build and maintain internal serving APIs, model registries, and deployment tooling

Model Optimization

• Quantization: FP8, INT8, and INT4 weight and activation quantization plus KV cache quantization
• Speculative decoding: draft-model, EAGLE/Medusa-style, and n-gram approaches
• Distillation: build smaller task-specific students from larger teachers for latency-critical paths
• Pruning and adapters: structured pruning, LoRA/adapter serving, and multi-adapter batching for per-deployment specialization
• Compilation: torch.compile, CUDA graphs, and TensorRT-LLM engine builds

Kernel and Low-Level Performance

• Profile with Nsight Systems/Compute and the PyTorch profiler
• Write and tune custom kernels in CUDA and Triton
• Eliminate host-device synchronization stalls, dynamic-shape recompilation, and unoverlapped collectives in distributed serving
• Work fluently with attention and MoE kernel libraries (FlashAttention, FlashInfer, CUTLASS/cuBLAS, expert-parallel dispatch libraries) and know when to use them versus write your own

Evaluation, Reliability, and Cost

• Own the optimization regression gate
• Build load-testing harnesses that replay realistic traffic
• Run capacity planning and cost modeling
• Carry on-call for inference services, write runbooks, and lead blameless postmortems on latency and availability incidents
• Work closely with the training and post-training teams so that serving constraints inform model architecture decisions early, not after the checkpoint lands

Must Have

• 6 to 10 years total experience, with 3+ years owning large-scale LLM or speech inference in production
• Has owned an inference platform end to end: architecture, SLOs, capacity, cost, deployment safety, and on-call
• Has written or substantially tuned custom CUDA or Triton kernels that shipped to production
• MoE serving at scale: expert parallelism, routing load imbalance, dispatch kernels, and the failure modes specific to sparse models
• Deep profiling ability
• Track record running an accuracy-preserving optimization program (quantization plus speculative decoding plus distillation) behind real evaluation gates
• Sets technical direction, mentors engineers, and can make a defensible build-versus-adopt call on serving infrastructure
• Upstream contributions to open-source serving or kernel projects (vLLM, SGLang, FlashInfer, TensorRT-LLM, or similar) — a strong plus, and close to an expectation at this level

Good to Have

• Real-time speech inference: streaming ASR/TTS, sub-second time-to-first-audio budgets, barge-in and turn-taking constraints
• Serving hybrid-architecture models (state-space/Mamba blocks combined with attention) and understanding their distinct state and cache management
• TensorRT-LLM engine building, NVIDIA NIM, or Triton Inference Server in production
• Experience with Indic or other multilingual and code-mixed models, and the evaluation discipline that comes with them
• Ray Serve, KServe, LLM gateways, or semantic and prefix cache layers
• Enough training-side exposure (Megatron, NeMo, DeepSpeed, FSDP) to work fluently with the pretraining team
• Public benchmarks, blog posts, or talks on inference optimization

What You Will Work On

You will work on in-house foundational models — not third-party API endpoints — running on large NVIDIA GPU clusters and serving live enterprise and government-scale voice traffic. The models are ours, so the whole stack is open to you: you can change the serving engine, the quantization recipe, the kernel, or the model itself, and you will often need to change more than one to hit a target.

The constraints are real and the feedback loop is fast. A latency regression is heard by callers within minutes. A successful optimization shows up directly in infrastructure spend. You will have access to proprietary speech and language data, in-house training and evaluation infrastructure, a close engineering partnership with NVIDIA, and a team that has been building Indian-language AI since 2016.

This role has a clear path to owning the inference platform and its technical direction, or to a deeper specialization in performance and kernel engineering, depending on where your strength lies.