Member of Technical Staff - Model Serving / API Backend Engineer

Black Forest Labs seeks a Senior Model Serving Engineer to bridge research and production. The role focuses on building high-performance APIs, optimizing GPU infrastructure, and ensuring reliable ML inference services in a hybrid Fribourg setting.

This position serves as the critical link between cutting-edge research and operational reality. The engineer will span backend systems, GPU performance tuning, and production machine learning serving to ensure that new models are deployed efficiently and reliably.

Responsibilities

• Convert research checkpoints into production-ready inference services
• Design and maintain high-performance APIs serving millions of requests
• Optimize inference latency and throughput across GPU infrastructure
• Build scalable serving architectures that handle unpredictable traffic
• Improve reliability, monitoring, and observability across model-serving systems
• Prototype and ship demos that showcase new capabilities in days, not weeks
• Collaborate closely with researchers to move from idea to live endpoint rapidly

Requirements

• Experience scaling APIs or ML systems under load
• Ownership from system design through debugging and deployment
• Strong judgment around performance, reliability, and cost tradeoffs
• Comfort working in fast-moving, research-adjacent environments
• Building and operating ML inference services in production
• Designing scalable API architectures with async processing
• Optimizing GPU workloads (batching, quantization, compilation, CUDA)
• Managing distributed systems and task queues under variable load
• Implementing monitoring and observability for production ML systems
• Debugging performance bottlenecks across model, infrastructure, and network layers

Nice to have

• Real-time or low-latency inference systems
• TensorRT, reduced precision, layer fusion, or model compilation techniques
• Frontend demo tooling (Streamlit, Gradio, React)
• CI/CD and automated testing for ML systems
• Security best practices for API and model serving

What the company offers

• Base annual salary between $180,000 and $300,000 USD
• Coverage of reasonable travel costs for in-person meetings

About the company

Black Forest Labs is a compact team of approximately 50 people. The culture prioritizes technical depth over noise, collaboration over individual heroics, and honest technical discussions rather than hype. The organization is guided by four core values: being Obsessed, maintaining a Low Ego, acting Bold, and remaining Kind.

• The company is grounded in four values: Obsessed, Low Ego, Bold, and Kind.
• The team values depth over noise, collaboration over hero culture, and honest technical conversations over hype.
• The company is a ~50-person team.