Drive TTFT below 400ms for multi-step agent pipelines
Streaming optimization: first token to user while sub-agents are still running
KV cache strategy, prompt compression, dynamic context window management
Multi-provider routing: model selection by latency, cost, and task type across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and open-weight models
Design and implement Plan-Execute-Synthesize pipelines that run sub-agents in parallel DAGs, not sequential chains
Build reliable orchestration on top of Temporal: retries, timeouts, partial failure recovery, idempotency
Structured output enforcement: JSON schema validation, retry loops on malformed LLM output, graceful degradation
Tool call design: schema design that LLMs actually follow reliably across providers
Own the eval framework end to end: ground truth datasets, automated scoring pipelines, regression detection on every PR
LLM-as-judge pipelines for qualitative output assessment
Latency regression testing
p50/p95/p99 tracked across every deployment
Adversarial test case design: ambiguous queries, missing data, conflicting sources, malformed tool responses
Model serving and cold start optimization
Async worker architecture for parallel sub-agent execution
Observability: trace every token, every tool call, every synthesis step

You've built something that runs in production at a meaningful scale and you understand why it's fast (or why it isn't).
You've worked on inference pipelines where TTFT was the primary metric and you moved it meaningfully
You've built multi-step agent systems and you know where they break not from reading papers but from watching them fail in production
You've written eval harnesses from scratch and you have opinions about what makes a ground truth dataset actually useful
You've debugged LLM non-determinism in production and built systems resilient to it
You've worked with streaming LLM responses and built infrastructure around partial output handling
Strong ML research background without systems exposure
Stack familiarity: Go, Python, Temporal, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Docker

Senior AI Engineer – Inference, Agent Systems

Key skills