Software Engineer, Inference
Luma AI
Redwood City, CA · $195k–$345k a year · Posted October 8, 2026
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Where Redwood City, CA ranks
Where Redwood City, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #2Best cities for director and executive jobs in the West Coast32% · of 71
- #3Cities with the most hybrid jobs28% · of 100
- #3Cities with the most hybrid jobs in the West Coast28% · of 66
- #8Best all-round cities for remote workers in the West Coast68 / 100 · of 39
- #9Cities that post pay most often44% · of 100
- #10Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast17% · of 54
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $270,000 a year. Across 475 open software engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $159,500 to $238,500 and the median is $197,500. That is 37% above the median, above the middle half of those listings.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
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About the job
You'll own how Luma's models get served — integrating new architectures into the inference engine, scaling deployments across thousands of machines, and keeping expensive GPU fleets busy while meeting internal SLOs.
This is large-scale inference systems work: scheduling, fleet management, deployment pipelines, and reliability across clusters and hardware providers. It fits a strong systems engineer comfortable with model serving and Kubernetes at scale. If you want pure modeling rather than the systems that run models, this is firmly the systems side.
What You'll Own
- Ship new model architectures by integrating them into the inference engine.
- Collaborate across research, engineering, and infrastructure to optimize model efficiency and deployments.
- Build internal tooling to measure, profile, and track the lifetime of inference jobs and workflows.
- Automate, test, and maintain inference services for maximum uptime and reliability.
- Manage and optimize inference workloads across clusters and hardware providers, and scale deployments across thousands of machines.
- Build scheduling systems that use expensive GPU resources optimally while meeting SLOs, and maintain CI/CD for model checkpoints and SDKs.
First 90 Days
One way the first 90 could unfold.
- Days 1–30 — Immerse & Diagnose: Learn the inference stack, the fleets, and where reliability or utilization break.
- Days 30–60 — Ship & Validate: Integrate a model or ship tooling/scheduling that improves uptime or GPU utilization.
- Days 60–90 — Scale & Systemize: Harden deployment pipelines and scheduling across clusters and providers.
What You Bring
- Strong Python and system-architecture skills.
- Experience deploying models with PyTorch, Hugging Face, vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, or similar.
- Experience with queues, scheduling, traffic control, and fleet management at scale.
- Experience with Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes, and with orchestration, deployment, and scheduling.
- Familiarity with Redis and S3-compatible storage.
Nice to Have
- Modern networking stacks including RDMA (RoCE, InfiniBand, NVLink).
- High-performance large-scale ML systems (100+ GPUs).
- CUDA, and FFmpeg or multimedia processing.
About Luma: Luma's mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. We believe multimodality is critical for intelligence — the next step beyond language models comes from vision. Luma is an equal opportunity employer.