AI Systems Engineer

Who are we?

We’re a team buildingSagora—an AI for autonomous system design and operations. Sagora understands the characteristics of the workload, adapts to dynamic environments, and continuously optimizes multiple layers of the AI stack to achieve performance and cost objectives. Sagora designs and delivers system optimizations 10-100x faster than experts, reducing weeks of human effort to hours. The technology is based on a decade’s worth of know-how and insights from award-winning research in the Networks and Mobile Systems group at MIT CSAIL.

About the Role

We are hiring anAI Systems Engineer who blends strong systems instincts with enthusiasm for AI. This is not a role for someone who wishes AI would “go away”; we want engineers who lean into AI as a collaborator and tool for discovering new ideas in computer and networked systems. The goal is to truly transform computer systems design and optimization with AI.

You will help design, build, and ship the first versions of Glia’s product, working closely with the founders and engineering team to translate deep research into production systems.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and deploy core components of Glia’s AI-driven optimization stack.

• Collaborate with the founders to translate research insights into real, usable systems.

• Own critical pieces of the platform: routing, scheduling, autoscaling, hardware selection, inference engine integrations, and more.

• Build prototypes quickly, validate them, and iterate based on user and customer feedback.

• Help establish technical architecture, coding standards, and best practices for a high-velocity engineering culture.

• Set up development workflows, infrastructure, tooling, and deployment pipelines.

• Evaluate third-party tools/services and make key build vs. buy decisions.

• Document design and development work and help establish the foundation for future engineering hires.

What We’re Looking For

Because this field is new, we don’t expect years of experience. We’re looking for engineers with great systems intuition, intellectual curiosity, and a strong desire to embrace AI-driven engineering.

Strong signals include:

• Experience with AI inference, distributed serving, model optimization, and related topics.

• Hands-on with vLLM, PyTorch, Triton inference server, Ray Serve, or other inference frameworks

• Experience with GPU optimization, kernel design, CUDA programming, and low-level systems performance engineering

• Strong Python and PyTorch fundamentals

• Comfort in building large-scale, high-performance distributed systems

• PhD or equivalent experience (PhD or equivalent + ~5 years is a good sweet spot)

• Dislike for rigid bureaucratic engineering processes, but appreciation for disciplined engineering rigor.

Why Join Sagora?

• Strong pedigree: Work alongside a team of renowned experts in AI-driven systems.

• Massive impact: Our technology has demonstrated the ability to achieve significant improvements in long-running engineering research and design tasks spanning performance engineering, model pipeline development, and cost optimization..

• Robust financials: Our seed round ($13.5M) closed in September 2025; we’re backed by top-tier VC firms (Pillar,E14, andNeotribe), as well as luminaries likeJeff Dean,Ion Stoica,Aparna Chennapragada,Nick McKeown,Srinivas Narayanan, and more. We are in the midst of multiple paid PoCs with marquee customers.

• Solving hard problems: We are solving the fundamental bottlenecks of the AI revolution: quality, performance, and cost.