Senior Machine Learning Engineer (vLLM)

About the role

*Telecommuting permitted: work may be performed within normal commuting distance from the Red Hat, LLC office in Boston, MA.

Lead the design and implementation of high-performance Python, C++, CUDA, and Triton code for vLLM-based inference systems, GPU kernels, and numerical computing components in production-scale LLM serving environments.

What You Will Do

• Architect, develop, and optimize advanced LLM inference algorithms, including quantization, sparsification, speculative decoding, paged attention, KV cache optimization, batching, scheduling, and memory management, to significantly improve latency, throughput, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Drive deep performance profiling, benchmarking, and modeling on NVIDIA GPUs, using tools such as Nsight Systems, Nsight Compute, CUPTI, PyTorch Profiler, CUDA, Triton, and CUTLASS to identify bottlenecks and deliver measurable system-level improvements.
• Own the end-to-end optimization of vLLM-based inference pipelines, including kernel-level tuning, runtime optimization, distributed inference, multi-GPU serving, tensor/pipeline parallelism, and large-scale deployment performance.
• Evaluate, prototype, and integrate state-of-the-art LLM serving techniques from cutting-edge research and open-source communities, including quantization, sparsity, speculative decoding, continuous batching, prefix caching, attention optimization, and model compression.
• Set engineering standards for performance-critical code, conduct rigorous peer reviews, guide testing and benchmarking strategies, and leverage AI-assisted development tools to maintain high code quality, reliability, and maintainability.
• Contribute to and maintain upstream open-source ML infrastructure vLLM, including reviewing pull requests, triaging issues, participating in design discussions, and supporting release readiness.
• Stay at the forefront of LLM systems research and GPU computing advancements, proactively identifying opportunities to improve the product through emerging techniques in serving efficiency, hardware utilization, and model acceleration.

What You Will Bring

• Master's degree (U.S. or foreign equivalent) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field and three (3) years of experience in the job offered or related role OR Bachelor's degree (U.S. or foreign equivalent) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field and five (5) years of experience in the job offered or related role.
• Must have three (3) years of experience with: high-performance Python and Modern C++ development; performance analysis, benchmarking, and profiling on NVIDIA GPUs using Nsight or similar tools; and GPU memory architecture and memory optimization for deep learning workloads.
• Must have two (2) years of experience with: making open-source pull requests to PyTorch or vLLM; CUDA, Triton, or CUTLASS kernel optimization; LLM inference optimization, including quantization, KV cache or batching; distributed computing including inter and intra GPU communication protocols; and leading technical design, reviewing performance-critical code.

#LI-DNI

Pay and benefits

The salary range for this position is $ 186,160 - $287,410 /year. Actual offer will be based on your qualifications.

Pay Transparency

Red Hat determines compensation based on several factors including but not limited to job location, experience, applicable skills and training, external market value, and internal pay equity. Annual salary is one component of Red Hat's compensation package. This position may also be eligible for bonus, commission, and/or equity. For positions with Remote-US locations, the actual salary range for the position may differ based on location but will be commensurate with job duties and relevant work experience.

Inclusion at Red Hat

Red Hat's culture is built on the open source principles of transparency, collaboration, and inclusion, where the best ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. When this is realized, it empowers people from different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences to come together to share ideas, challenge the status quo, and drive innovation. We hope you will join our celebration, and we welcome and encourage applicants from all the beautiful dimensions that compose our global village.