Member of Technical Staff, Backend/Platform Engineer

San Mateo, CA

About the role

About Us:

At Fireworks, we’re building the future of generative AI infrastructure. Our platform delivers the highest-quality models with the fastest and most scalable inference in the industry. We’ve been independently benchmarked as the leader in LLM inference speed and are driving cutting-edge innovation through projects like our own function calling and multimodal models. Fireworks is a Series C company valued at $4 billion and backed by top investors including Benchmark, Sequoia, Lightspeed, Index, and Evantic. We’re an ambitious, collaborative team of builders, founded by veterans of Meta PyTorch and Google Vertex AI.

The Role:

You’ll be a core builder of the backend systems that power Fireworks:

  • Our main web application
  • Model and fine-tuning job orchestration
  • Billing and enterprise features
  • Accounts, org management, access controls
  • Policy enforcement and governance
  • APIs and developer tooling
  • And many other cool things!

This is platform engineering with product impact. Your systems will directly shape how customers build on top of AI. You’ll work closely with product, frontend, infra, and GTM to ship end-to-end features — not just tickets.

What You’ll Do

  • Design and build scalable backend services
  • Own major product surfaces from architecture to production
  • Improve reliability, performance, and developer experience
  • Work directly with customers to understand pain points
  • Ship enterprise-grade features without enterprise slowness
  • Use AI tooling aggressively — we expect you to automate yourself

You Might Be a Fit If

  • You like building real products, not just infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake
  • You enjoy driving initiatives across teams to get things done
  • You think in terms of systems, tradeoffs, and business impact
  • You care about developer experience and clean abstractions
  • You’re curious about AI and want to build where the future is going
  • You want ownership, not task lists

Minimum Qualifications

  • Comfortable collaborating with both humans and AI systems (Yes, We’re Serious)
  • 5+ years of experience helping humans solve real problems
  • 2+ years of working with AI — agents, bots, chats, or building on top of models

Total compensation for this role also includes meaningful equity in a fast-growing startup, along with a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package. Base salary is determined by a range of factors including individual qualifications, experience, skills, interview performance, market data, and work location. The listed salary range is intended as a guideline and may be adjusted.

Base Pay Range (Plus Equity)$175,000$220,000 USD

Why Fireworks AI?

  • Solve Hard Problems: Tackle challenges at the forefront of AI infrastructure, from low-latency inference to scalable model serving.
  • Build What’s Next: Work with bleeding-edge technology that impacts how businesses and developers harness AI globally.
  • Ownership & Impact: Join a fast-growing, passionate team where your work directly shapes the future of AI—no bureaucracy, just results.
  • Learn from the Best: Collaborate with world-class engineers and AI researchers who thrive on curiosity and innovation.

Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all innovators.

About Fireworks AI

Fireworks is the fastest way to build, tune, and scale AI on open models. Ship production-ready AI in seconds on our globally distributed cloud infrastructure, optimized for your use case. Fireworks powers production workloads at companies like Uber, Doordash, Notion, and Cursor—delivering 15× faster speed, 4× lower latency, and 4× more concurrency than closed models.

Other roles at Fireworks AI

Interested?

Let me introduce you to the founders.

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Job details

Salary

$120,000 - $250,000

Location

San Mateo, CA

Company

NameFireworks AI
Industryai, software_development, devtools, data, b2b, api_sdk
Team Size211

Funding

Total raised

$327M

Last stage

Series C

Investors

Sequoia Capital
Benchmark
Lightspeed Venture Partners
Index Ventures
NVIDIA

Founders

BC

Benny Chen

Co-Founder

Benny Yufei Chen

Benny Yufei Chen

Co-Founder

LinkedIn
Lin Qiao

Lin Qiao

CEO and cofounder

LinkedIn
DD

Dmytro Dzhulgakov

CTO, Co-Founder

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.