Software Engineer - Baseten for Labs

About Baseten

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $300M Series E, backed by investors including BOND, IVP, Spark Capital, Greylock, and Conviction. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products.

THE ROLE:

You'll join Baseten for Labs — a small, high-ownership team building the products that power how model labs and AI researchers ship and scale their models. This team moves fast and owns its outcomes end-to-end.

This is a role for a full-stack, product-minded engineer who likes working across the whole surface area: from shaping a clean API or user-facing feature, to building the backend systems that run it reliably in production. You'll contribute across three interconnected product areas:

• Model Library — The place developers discover, evaluate, and deploy the right model for their use case. You'll build the browsing, evaluation, and onboarding experiences that help developers navigate an exploding model landscape.
• Inference API Gateway — A production-ready, white-labeled API gateway that lets model labs serve their models to customers under their own domain. You'll build the auth, key management, rate limiting, metering, and multi-tenant isolation that power it.

You'll work on meaningful, high-impact projects with real ownership of your work — and you'll think about the developer experience as much as the systems design.

EXAMPLE INITIATIVES:

• Model APIs for frontier models
• Model training built for production inference
• Introducing the Baseten Frontier Gateway

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Take meaningful ownership of projects: from API design and backend implementation to frontend surfaces, rollout, and operation.
• Build backend services with high reliability and clear SLOs — auth, rate limiting, quotas, metering, and multi-tenant isolation.
• Ship developer-facing product surfaces: dashboards, onboarding flows, and self-serve tooling that reduce time-to-value.
• Collaborate closely with design, product, and GTM to define and ship what labs and developers actually need.
• Drive performance and reliability improvements through profiling, tracing, and load testing.

REQUIREMENTS:

• 4+ years building and operating production software, including at least some full-stack experience (backend-primary is fine, but you're comfortable touching the frontend).
• Demonstrated ability to take initiative and contribute beyond the spec — you think about the "why" behind what you build.
• Strong backend fundamentals: API design, distributed systems, observability, and operational rigor.
• Comfort working across the stack: backend services, data pipelines, and user-facing product surfaces.
• Strong written communication — clear design docs, effective async collaboration.
• Genuine curiosity about the AI/ML infrastructure space; you don't need ML expertise, but you want to understand the ecosystem.

NICE TO HAVE:

• Experience building developer-facing products: APIs, SDKs, CLIs, dashboards, or self-serve workflows.
• Experience with API gateways, auth systems, billing/metering infrastructure, or multi-tenant platforms.
• Frontend experience (React/TypeScript) or strong product UX instincts for developer tools.
• Familiarity with model serving, LLM runtimes, or inference platforms.
• Comfort with Kubernetes, distributed scheduling, or service mesh concepts.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
• Paid parental leave
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
• Company-facilitated 401(k)
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you.

At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).

Compensation Range: $165K - $330K