Software Engineer, Inference

The posting, as Sierra wrote it

ABOUT US

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. 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. You’ll work on the systems responsible for serving and routing inference, managing capacity and quota, and optimizing for latency, reliability, and cost.

This is a systems-first role at the intersection of distributed infrastructure and AI. You don’t need to be an ML researcher—we’re looking for engineers who love complex systems problems and are excited to apply that expertise to one of the fastest-moving areas of AI infrastructure.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Partner with frontier labs and providers. At our scale, we rely on frontier labs, and inference providers to supply capacity, training and inference infrastructure.
• Shape Sierra’s inference architecture. Design how inference traffic flows across models, infrastructure, and providers, including new serving and proxy layers as Sierra scales.
• Build for low latency and high reliability. Develop systems for routing, failover, capacity management, and quota that keep inference performant and available across large-scale production workloads.
• Build and operate self-hosted inference. Run models on GPU infrastructure, from building containers and operating inference engines to managing the underlying compute capacity.
• Optimize inference performance. Work with the Applied Research team on techniques such as speculative decoding and serving-engine

[…]
, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.

• Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

WHAT WE OFFER

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:

• 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, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized
• Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most
• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

BE YOU, WITH US

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.