At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Workplace
- Onsite
- Location
- San Francisco
About Sierra
- Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.
- We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.
- Our co-founders are Bret Taylor https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor/ and Clay Bavor https://www.linkedin.com/in/claybavor/. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.
About the role
- Sierra's AI agents depend on foundation models to reason and act in real time, and the Inference team builds the systems that make those models fast, reliable, and efficient at scale.
- As a Software Engineer on Inference, you'll help define Sierra's inference architecture across both self-hosted models and third-party inference providers.
- This is a systems-first role at the intersection of distributed infrastructure and AI, focusing on serving, routing, capacity management, and performance optimization.
Responsibilities
- Partner with frontier labs and providers to supply capacity, training, and inference infrastructure.
- Shape Sierra's inference architecture by designing how inference traffic flows across models, infrastructure, and providers.
- Build for low latency and high reliability by developing systems for routing, failover, capacity management, and quota.
- Build and operate self-hosted inference by running models on GPU infrastructure, building containers, and managing compute capacity.
- Optimize inference performance by working with the Applied Research team on techniques like speculative decoding and serving-engine optimizations.
- Build across a hybrid inference stack, making architectural decisions about where and how workloads should run.
- Push the serving stack forward by working closely with inference providers to tune engines and infrastructure.
- Support the broader model lifecycle by contributing to post-training infrastructure and partnering with Models and Agent Runtime teams.
Requirements
- Deep systems thinking and strong distributed systems fundamentals.
- Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale production systems.
- Strong judgment around tradeoffs involving latency, reliability, capacity, and cost.
- Experience taking ownership of complex infrastructure from architecture through production operation.
- Excitement about applying systems expertise to AI infrastructure and learning quickly as technology evolves.
Benefits
- Flexible (unlimited) paid time off
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
- Life insurance and disability benefits
- Retirement plan dependent on country of employment
- Parental leave
- Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
- Lunch, snacks, and coffee provided in office
- Discretionary benefit stipend
- Free alphorn lessons
- Equity plans eligibility for eligible full-time employees
Workplace
- Primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco
Skills
- vLLM
- SGLang
- GPU Infrastructure
