Founding Engineer -- AI Inference Stack

About Piris Labs

The Networking Layer of AI

The 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.

Skills

• Rust
• TCP/IP
• Design systems
• Transformers