LLM Engineer Jobs in San Francisco

Redwood Research is dedicated to ensuring the safe development of artificial intelligence through rigorous technical research, thoughtful analysis, and strategic advising. As an empirical researcher, you will design and execute experiments on frontier language models. Your work will focus on assessing AI risks and evaluating the effectiveness of safety measures designed to mitigate them.

$350k - $850k

Databricks

Databricks is seeking an SAP Technical Lead to spearhead the technical architecture and delivery of their SAP platform. This role involves defining the technical vision for a clean-core S/4HANA landscape, guiding the engineers who develop on it, and architecting the AI layer that connects SAP with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. The objective is to establish standards, make strategic build-versus-adopt decisions, and ensure all deliverables are secure, performant, and scalable. The SAP platform will underpin core finance processes like Record-to-Report, Source-to-Pay, and Order-to-Cash, with a focus on leveraging SAP BTP and the Databricks Lakehouse for automated, AI-driven workflows that maintain a clean, upgradable, and fast core.

$198k - $273k

Baseten

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for leading AI companies, enabling them to bring cutting-edge models into production. We are seeking inference performance engineers to make demanding AI workloads run faster and more efficiently. You will work across the entire stack, from the inference engine and runtime through scheduling, serving, and routing, applying advanced techniques to optimize performance. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in a fast-paced startup environment and is eager to make significant contributions to LLM inference.

$180k - $360k

Crusoe

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead an engineering team focused on making large language models run faster, cheaper, and more reliably in production. This role balances team leadership with core systems and performance engineering on demanding models in production, requiring you to stay deeply technical and hands-on with the inference stack end to end. The work is applied, not academic, with optimizations landing in real customer deployments. You will tailor deployments to customer needs, take workloads from proof of concept to production, and ensure performance gains deliver clear business and customer value. This leadership role combines people management, technical direction, and hands-on coding and profiling, with a customer-facing component and elements of product and technical solutions leadership.

$250k - $300k

Cerebras

Cerebras is developing a new generation of disaggregated AI inference systems that combine GPU-accelerated prefill with ultra-fast decode on the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine. We are seeking a Software Engineer to build and enhance the ML API layer, making this heterogeneous serving system accessible, reliable, and user-friendly. You will operate across our inference APIs, model integration layer, request-routing services, and the Cerebras inference platform to ensure a consistent experience across various models and accelerator backends. This role is at the intersection of machine learning systems, API design, model serving, and distributed systems, enabling new model architectures and inference capabilities while defining stable user-facing behavior and ensuring features like streaming, sampling, tool use, structured outputs, and multimodal inputs function correctly in production.

Salary not listed

Databricks

As a staff software engineer for GenAI inference, you will lead the architecture, development, and optimization of the inference engine that powers Databricks Foundation Model API. You’ll bridge research advances and production demands, ensuring high throughput, low latency, and robust scaling. Your work will encompass the full GenAI inference stack: kernels, runtimes, orchestration, memory, and integration with frameworks and orchestration systems.

$191k - $233k

Handshake is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Backend Platform team, with a primary focus on supporting Handshake AI (HAI) and internal AI initiatives. This role involves building and maintaining backend services, shared platform capabilities, and developer tooling. The work will center on core backend platform concerns such as service architecture, APIs, data systems, performance, reliability, and developer experience, with an increasing use of LLMs and agents. The ideal candidate will possess strong backend fundamentals combined with practical knowledge of LLM-powered and agentic systems.

$208k - $260k

Anthropic

The Encodings Infra team at Anthropic maintains the libraries that engineers and researchers use to encode text and multimodal data for Claude. This team also defines Claude's prompt structure, including how user turns are represented and how Claude interacts with tools. As a Software Engineer on this team, you will be responsible for the design and upkeep of these libraries, ensuring their APIs are intuitive, performance is optimized, and abstractions are robust. Your work will span across various systems, from pretraining to finetuning and the API, requiring close collaboration with researchers and engineers to facilitate the rapid transition of new encoding ideas from experimentation to production.

$320k - $405k

Reflection ai

Reflection is a research lab dedicated to making intelligence open and accessible. We build open models that empower individuals to control their AI and shape its future. This role focuses on designing and operating large-scale multilingual data pipelines, ensuring the quality and effectiveness of data used for training advanced language models. You will contribute to scientific experiments aimed at improving multilingual data efficiency in large language models and develop evaluation sets to identify and address model performance gaps across different languages and domains.

Salary not listed

Anthropic

The Safeguards ML Sampling Path team builds and operates the production services that power Claude's safety systems. These services are critical, sitting on the token generation path across every platform Claude runs on. You will be responsible for keeping p99 latency flat as traffic grows, building for robustness against dependency failures, and safely shipping changes to a system that cannot go down. This role requires a strong foundation in distributed systems and a focus on designing systems for graceful degradation.

$320k - $485k

Fireworks is seeking new graduates for its Member of Technical Staff role, offering a unique opportunity to work on real AI systems in production from day one. As an MTS, you will write and ship code for one of the world's busiest inference platforms, serving hundreds of models at massive scale. The company matches new hires to teams based on their strengths and interests, with potential work spanning inference, model training, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, or full-stack application engineering. You will be paired with a senior engineer mentor and undergo a structured ramp-up, starting with well-scoped problems and progressing to owning features and systems independently. Fireworks emphasizes a fast-paced environment with a high bar and a commitment to employee development.

$160k - $180k