HOME AI & Research Applied AI Research Engineer
  • Beam
  • San Francisco, CA
  • Full-Time
  • 75 days ago
  • $140,000 – $200,000
B Beam VERIFIED EMPLOYER

Applied AI Research Engineer.

AI & Research Full-Time

Applied AI Research Engineer: our view in 3 lines...

  • The Role:This role is for an engineer focused on LLM inference research and optimisation for an AI inference platform.
  • The Person:The person will own inference research, reduce cost per token and latency, optimize production workloads, and turn customer learnings into platform improvements.
  • Requirements:The ideal candidate has a systems or research background in LLM inference, deep understanding of LLM serving, and experience shipping products or research in production-like scenarios.

About the role

Beam is an ultrafast AI inference platform. We built a serverless runtime that launches GPU-backed containers in less than 1 second and quickly scales out to thousands of GPUs. Developers use our platform to serve apps to millions of users around the globe. We're backed by Y Combinator, Tiger Global, and prominent developer-tool founders, including the founder of Snyk and former CTO of GitHub.

About the Role

We’re looking to hire someone to own inference research hands-on and find ways to lower cost per token and latency on our customer workloads.

  • Low-level inference optimization, from speculative decoding, quantization, KV-cache and memory management
  • Work directly with customers to optimize their production workloads, and apply your learnings to our platform as product improvements
  • High-level of autonomy to find the highest upside bets and guide the future of our inference platform based on your work

Skills & Experience

  • Systems or research background in LLM inference
  • Deep understanding of LLM serving, from the kernel to the scheduler
  • History of shipping products or research that people use in production-like scenarios, whether academic or industry
  • Excited to collaborate closely with customers
  • Enthusiasm for developer tools, cloud native technologies, and open source software

Benefits

  • Competitive salary and meaningful equity
  • Join a fast-growing pre-series A company at the ground floor
  • Health, dental, and vision benefits with 90% coverage for you and 50% for dependents
  • Opportunities to participate in events across the cloud native community
  • Fitness stipend, learning budget, and much, much more

Cloud computing is broken.

AI has introduced a new generation of workloads, like GPU inference, sandboxes, and agents. These aren't ordinary applications that can be run as Lambdas, or Dockerized apps on VMs: they're massive, stateless containers that need to spin up in <1s, often across multiple clouds and regions.

Today, engineers are hacking together infra that breaks under real-world loads. That's where we come in.

Our mission is to build the world's best compute platform for AI. Our first product is a serverless inference platform, used by companies like Coca Cola, Geospy and hundreds more. We've built our own container runtime, called beta9, which is designed for launching GPU-backed containers in under 1s.

We're a small, highly-technical team, with backgrounds in distributed systems and robotics. We've raised $7M from YC, Tiger, Guy Podjarny (Founder of Snyk), and Jason Warner (former CTO of Github).

We're searching for intensely curious, passionate, and hard-working engineers to join our mission in rebuilding the cloud for the age of AI.

Published July 14, 2026
Location San Francisco, CA
Category AI & Research  
Job Type Full-Time