Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

• We’re looking for a Senior or Staff Software Engineer with deep experience building and operating distributed production systems
• You’ll work on the infrastructure underlying Hedra’s inference platform: systems that schedule and route compute, serve models efficiently, handle high-throughput workloads, and remain reliable as both traffic and the number of models we support grow
• The problems are often ambiguous and don’t have obvious answers. We’re looking for someone who can reason from first principles, identify bottlenecks and failure modes before they become problems, and make thoughtful tradeoffs across performance, reliability, complexity, and cost
• Design, build, and operate distributed systems that power Hedra’s inference infrastructure
• Build systems for scheduling, routing, and managing compute-intensive workloads across heterogeneous resources
• Improve throughput, latency, reliability, and resource utilization across our serving infrastructure
• Design systems that remain predictable and resilient under load, partial failures, changing capacity, and unpredictable workloads
• Own production systems end to end, including deployment, CI/CD, testing and validation, observability, monitoring, alerting, debugging, and incident response
• Identify architectural bottlenecks and failure modes and drive solutions rather than waiting for problems to be fully specified
• Work across infrastructure, model serving, APIs, and developer-facing systems as the platform evolves
• Use modern agentic coding workflows as part of how you design, build, debug, and ship software
• Help shape the technical direction of a small engineering organization where individual engineers have substantial ownership

Benefits

• Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental)
• 401k (no match)
• Gym access (at our office)
• Equity

Preferred experience

• You do not need to come from an AI company or already be an expert in model inference. We care much more about depth in distributed systems and your ability to apply that experience to a new problem space
• Strong judgment around architectural tradeoffs, particularly reliability, performance, complexity, and operational cost
• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building distributed backend or infrastructure systems
• Strong programming fundamentals and experience working in systems-oriented backend languages. Python experience is helpful given our stack
• A track record of designing and operating high-availability production services at meaningful scale
• Experience using agentic coding tools and workflows beyond basic prompting
• Experience debugging complex production systems across multiple layers of the stack
• Experience with CI/CD, comprehensive testing and validation strategies, monitoring, alerting, and production operations
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including experience reasoning about concurrency, queues, retries, failure recovery, consistency, backpressure, capacity, and system behavior under load
• Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly and collaborate with engineers across infrastructure, research, and product
• Comfort operating in an environment where problems are often underspecified and engineers are expected to independently determine the right approach
• GPU or accelerator infrastructure
• Experience with inference or model-serving infrastructure
• Compute scheduling, orchestration, or resource management
• High-throughput or low-latency systems
• Kubernetes or other cluster orchestration systems
• Performance optimization and profiling
• Experience operating infrastructure across cloud and/or bare-metal environments
• Developer infrastructure, APIs, SDKs, or platform engineering