Staff Software Engineer, Inference API

The posting, as Cerebras Systems wrote it

Cerebras Systems builds the world's largest AI chip, 56 times larger than GPUs. This architecture allows Cerebras to deliver industry-leading training and inference speeds; over 10 times faster than GPU-based hyperscale cloud inference services.

This order of magnitude increase in speed is transforming the user experience of AI applications, unlocking real-time iteration and increasing intelligence via additional agentic computation.

Cerebras works with the leading model labs, global enterprises, and cutting-edge AI-native startups. OpenAI recently announced a multi-year partnership https://openai.com/index/cerebras-partnership/ with Cerebras, to deploy 750 megawatts of scale, transforming key workloads with ultra high-speed inference.

About the Role

Cerebras is building 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 hiring a Software Engineer to build and evolve the ML API layer that makes this heterogeneous serving system accessible, reliable, and easy to use. You will work across our inference APIs, model integration layer, request-routing services and Cerebras inference platform to deliver a consistent experience across models and accelerator backends.

This role sits at the intersection of machine learning systems, API design, model serving, and distributed systems. You will enable new model architectures and inference capabilities, define stable user-facing behavior, and ensure that features such as streaming, sampling, tool use, structured outputs, multimodal inputs, and model configuration behave correctly and consistently in production.

You will work closely with model enablement, compiler, runtime, cloud infrastructure, product, customer-facing teams, and customers directly. This is a hands-on software engineering role for someone who enjoys turning rapidly evolving ML capabilities into durable, production-quality APIs.

Responsibilities

• Build production ML inference APIs. Design, implement, and maintain APIs for chat completions, text generation, streaming, model configuration, tool calling, structured outputs, multimodal inputs, and other emerging inference capabilities.
• Deliver a unified serving experience. Create consistent request and response semantics across GPU prefill, Cerebras decode, and other heterogeneous inference backends.
• Enable new models and capabilities. Integrate emerging foundation models, tokenizers, prompt formats, sampling methods, attention variants, multimodal inputs, and model-specific features into the serving platform.
• Own API compatibility and evolution. Maintain compatibility with widely adopted inference interfaces while designing Cerebras-specific extensions. Establish clear versioning, deprecation, validation, and backward compatibility practices.
• Integrate with model-serving runtimes. Extend and integrate custom inference services with vLLM, PyTorch, Hugging Fac

[…]
on, logits processing, stopping criteria, tool calling, structured generation, and constrained decoding.

• Experience with disaggregated prefill/decode architectures, KV-cache transfer, prefix caching, chunked prefill, memory-aware admission control, or request scheduling.
• Experience designing, building, or operating production APIs and services for machine learning, large language models, or other data-intensive applications.
• Familiarity with reduced-precision inference and quantization formats such as BF16, FP8, FP4, INT8, or INT4.

Why Join Cerebras

People who are serious about software make their own hardware. At Cerebras, we have built a breakthrough architecture that is unlocking new opportunities for the AI industry. With dozens of model releases and rapid growth, we’ve reached an inflection point in our business. Members of our team tell us there are five main reasons they joined Cerebras:

• Build a breakthrough AI platform beyond the constraints of the GPU.
• Publish and open source their cutting-edge AI research.
• Work on one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.
• Enjoy job stability with startup vitality.
• Our simple, non-corporate work culture that respects individual beliefs.

Find out more about what it's like to work at Cerebras here https://www.cerebras.ai/join-us!

Apply today and become part of the forefront of groundbreaking advancements in AI!

Cerebras Systems is committed to creating an equal and diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe inclusive teams build better products and companies. We try every day to build a work environment that empowers people to do their best work through continuous learning, growth and support of those around them.

This website or its third-party tools process personal data. For more details, click here https://www.cerebras.net/privacy/ to review our CCPA disclosure notice.