Founding Engineer -- AI Inference Stack
Founding Engineer -- AI Inference Stack at Piris Labs — San Francisco, CA, US
- Company: Piris Labs
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US
- Employment type: FULL_TIME
- Salary: USD 100000–200000 / year
- Posted: 2026-07-17
About this role
The Role: We are looking for elite systems hackers who want to own the software layer of a new architecture. You will be writing kernels and orchestration logic that outperform existing solutions.
What You Will Do:
Architect the Stack: Iterate on our software layer that orchestrates inference across heterogenous cluster of compute resources.
Kernel and Compiler Optimization: Write and optimize high-performance kernels in CUDA, Triton, or custom targets to squeeze every drop of performance from the system.
The Runtime: Build the low-latency inference server, think a more performant custom version of vLLM or TensorRT-LLM, that manages KV cache at scale without the overhead of traditional PCIe bottlenecks.
Voice and Agentic Optimization: Solve the unique challenges of instant-on Voice AI, focused on latency, and the high-context demands of coding agents, focused on memory management.
Who You Are:
Curiosity-driven, with a genuine passion for compute architectures and problem solving
Systems Obsessed: You have a deep understanding of computer architecture, memory hierarchies, and low-level systems programming in C++, Rust, or CUDA.
AI Fluent: You understand the guts of transformer architectures and have experience with inference frameworks like vLLM, TensorRT, ONNX, and Kubernetes.
A First-Principles Thinker: You are not afraid to throw out the standard way of doing things if it means achieving a 10x performance gain.
Why Piris Labs?
High Stakes, High Growth: We are a small, elite team of builders from Meta and Twitter, trained at Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. No middle management. No alignment meetings. Just engineering.
Venture Backed: Backed by YC W26 and tier-1 VC firms.
SF-Centric: We work in person in San Francisco. This is where the density of AI talent is, and we thrive on the high-bandwidth collaboration of a physical lab.
The Path to Full Time: This internship is a trial run for a founding-level equity stake. We are looking for people to grow with us through our Series A and beyond.