Machine Learning Systems Engineer at Inception – San Mateo, California

Description Inception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Our Mercury model is the world’s fastest reasoning LLM and first commercially available diffusion LLM, delivering 5x greater speed and efficiency than today’s LLMs, with best-in-class quality.
We are the AI researchers and engineers behind such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO.
We are looking for ML Systems Engineers who will design and implement the infrastructure that powers our ML training and inference systems. You will collaborate with ML researchers and engineers to build efficient, reliable, and scalable systems that enable the development and deployment of state-of-the-art diffusion LLMs.
Key Responsibilities:

• Build and optimize high-performance model serving systems for low-latency inference for diffusion LLMs
• Design and implement distributed training infrastructure for large-scale machine learning models
• Create monitoring and observability solutions for ML systems in production
• Optimize infrastructure costs and resource utilization across GPU clusters
• Design and implement efficient data storage and retrieval systems for ML workloads
• Collaborate with ML researchers to translate theoretical requirements into practical system designs

Qualifications:

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• Knowledge of ML serving frameworks (vLLM, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime)
• Understanding of ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) from a systems perspective
• Familiarity with high-performance computing and GPU programming (CUDA)
• Familiarity with distributed training techniques (data parallel, model parallel, pipeline parallel)
• Proficiency in Python and at least one systems programming language (C++/Rust/Go)
• Experience with containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines

Preferred Skills:

• Experience building and maintaining large-scale ML training clusters
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud computing platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Experience with ML workflow orchestration tools (Kubeflow, Airflow)
• Background in performance optimization and profiling of ML systems
• Knowledge of ML-specific infrastructure challenges (checkpointing, resource scheduling, etc.)
• Experience with MLOps practices and tooling

Why Join Inception

• Work with World-Class Talent: Collaborate with the inventors of diffusion models and leading AI researchers
• Shape Foundational Technology: Your decisions will influence how the next generation of AI products are built and used
• Immediate Impact: Join at the ground floor where your contributions directly shape product direction and company trajectory

Perks & Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity in a rapidly growing startup.
• Access to the latest GPU hardware and cloud resources
• Flexible vacation and paid time off (PTO).
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• A collaborative and inclusive culture

About UsInception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Today’s autoregressive LLMs generate tokens sequentially, which makes them painfully slow and expensive. Inception’s diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs) generate answers in parallel. They are 5x faster and more efficient, while delivering best-in-class quality.
Inception was co-founded by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, who co-invented such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO, UCLA professor Aditya Grover, who co-invented node2vec, decision transformers, and d1 reasoning, and Cornell professor and Afresh co-founder Volodymyr Kuleshov, who co-invented MDLM and Block Diffusion.
We pioneered the application of diffusion to language, launching the world’s first commercially available dLLM, Mercury, in early 2025. We are currently deploying our large-scale diffusion LLMs at Fortune 500 companies. Diffusion is the technology behind today’s image and video AI, and we’re making it the standard for LLMs as well.
Our team includes engineers from Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft AI, and OpenAI. Based in Palo Alto, CA, we are backed by A-list venture capitalists, including Menlo Ventures, Mayfield, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Snowflake Ventures, Databricks, and Innovation Endeavors, and by tech luminaries such as Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy, and Eric Schmidt.
If you are talented, innovative, and ambitious, come help us invent the future of AI.
We are an equal opportunity employer and encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply.