Software Engineer, Inference Infrastructure

About the role

• Software Engineer, Inference Infrastructure | Tesla (Tesla SI)
• Location: Palo Alto, California | Req ID: 222387 | Job Type: Full-time
• What to Expect

As a member of the Inference Infrastructure team, you will own the systems that power SI model development, validation, and deployment across custom SI hardware at scale. Your work sits at the intersection of large-scale distributed infrastructure and cutting-edge SI hardware — building the platform that Compiler, AI, and Optimus teams depend on to develop & validate models on next-generation chips.

This is not a supporting role; from cluster orchestration & hardware fleet management to inference pipelines & developer tooling, you will design and own foundational systems that directly determine how fast the org can move from a trained model to a validated, deployed artifact.

What You'll Do

• Own & scale the SI inference cluster — the physical and software platform that runs SI workloads on custom SI hardware across thousands of boards
• Build & improve job scheduling, hardware onboarding, and cluster self-healing systems that keep the fleet running at 95%+ uptime
• Design & implement inference pipelines that unify evals, sims, rollouts, and visualizations across SI and Optimus teams
• Build developer tooling that makes compiler-produced artifacts easy to run, validate, and debug on real hardware at scale
• Contribute to flashing, inventory management, and fleet management infrastructure for different hardware generations
• Work closely with Compiler, AI, and Optimus teams to understand their bottlenecks and build infrastructure that removes them

What You'll Bring

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals — distributed systems, job orchestration, reliability, and scale
• Experience with hardware accelerator infrastructure — TPUs, custom SI chips, or similar; strong understanding of what it means to manage a large fleet of accelerators and keep them healthy/utilized
• Familiarity with cluster orchestration — Kubernetes, SLURM, or similar bare metal & containerized environments
• Proficiency in Python; familiarity with PyTorch, Go or C++ is a plus
• Experience with low-level systems concepts — networking, file systems, process management
• Familiarity with ML inference workloads and what makes them fast or slow at scale
• Strong ownership mindset — comfortable navigating ambiguous problems, diving into unfamiliar codebases, and driving things to completion without hand-holding
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines for hardware-in-the-loop validation, expertise in fleet management or device provisioning at scale, and familiarity with gRPC, distributed task queues, or high-throughput data pipelines are nice-to-haves
• Exposure to MLIR or compiler toolchains is a nice-to-have (helpful for working with compiler-produced artifacts and understanding the compilation pipeline)

Benefits

Along with competitive pay, as a full-time Tesla employee, you are eligible for the following benefits at day 1 of hire:

• Medical plans > plan options with $0 payroll deduction
• Family-building, fertility, adoption and surrogacy benefits
• Dental (including orthodontic coverage) and vision plans, both have options with a $0 paycheck contribution
• Company Paid (Health Savings Accounts) HSA Contribution when enrolled in the High-Deductible medical plan with HSA
• Healthcare and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
• 401(k) with employer match, Employee Stock Purchase Plans, and other financial benefits
• Company paid Basic Life, AD&D
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance (90 day waiting period)
• Employee Assistance Program
• Sick and Vacation time (Flex time for salary positions, Accrued hours for Hourly positions), and Paid Holidays
• Back-up childcare and parenting support resources
• Voluntary benefits to include: critical illness, hospital indemnity, accident insurance, theft & legal services, and pet insurance
• Weight Loss and Tobacco Cessation Programs
• Tesla Babies program
• Commuter benefits
• Employee discounts and perks program
• Earned Wage Access: Real-time pay access paid daily, subject to eligibility and schedule (applicable for below Sr. Managers levels)

Expected Compensation$140,000 - $300,000/annual salary + cash and stock awards + benefitsPay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements dependent on the position offered. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.