Head of Engineering (AI Infrastructure)

Location: On-site in San Francisco, California; relocation will be considered for exceptional candidates.

Company

hirify.global develops vLLM and AI inference infrastructure to make model inference faster and more cost-efficient.

What you will do

• Build and lead the engineering organization developing systems that power vLLM and hirify.global.
• Scale a senior-heavy, specialized engineering team in partnership with the founders.
• Recruit, assess, develop, and retain senior engineers, staff-level ICs, PhDs, and research-oriented engineers.
• Translate research and infrastructure initiatives into priorities, ownership, execution plans, and operating mechanisms.
• Guide technical work across inference runtimes, GPU and accelerator optimization, kernels, memory, communication bottlenecks, and hardware-software tradeoffs.
• Represent engineering with open-source contributors, hardware partners, cloud providers, customers, candidates, and investors.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, machine learning, systems, or a related field.
• Engineering leadership experience building and scaling specialized teams in LLM inference, ML systems, GPU or accelerator software, distributed systems, or related infrastructure.
• Hands-on technical understanding of inference runtimes, GPU or accelerator optimization, kernels, memory and communication bottlenecks, and hardware-software tradeoffs.
• Strong experience recruiting and retaining senior technical talent in production engineering environments.
• Ability to set technical priorities, establish accountable ownership, and unblock teams without displacing technical ownership.

Nice to have

• Experience with LLM serving, vLLM, SGLang, model execution, GPU kernels, compiler or runtime systems, or distributed AI infrastructure.
• Experience integrating research-oriented or PhD talent into production engineering teams.
• Contributions to open-source ML systems such as vLLM, SGLang, PyTorch, Ray, Triton, XLA, or ROCm.
• Experience leading engineering in an early-stage AI infrastructure, developer infrastructure, distributed systems, or open-source company.

Culture & Benefits

• Work alongside the creators and core maintainers of vLLM.
• Maintain high technical standards, fast iteration, and direct ownership.
• Competitive base compensation with meaningful equity, determined by background, skills, and experience.
• Generous health, dental, and vision benefits.
• 401(k) company match.
• Visa sponsorship is available on a case-by-case basis.