LM Studio

Software Engineer, Inference Runtime

LM Studio · New York, NY
New York, NY $150K–$350K Posted 2026-08-07
Salary
$150K–$350K
Type
Full-time

LM Studio is used by millions of people around the world to run AI on their own computers, and now with Bionic - also in the cloud. Our values prioritize putting the human in the center, and creating tools that we want to use ourselves, and recommend to our friends and family.

As a team, we work with high technical intensity and personal responsibility. We are looking for curious, self-motivated, creative, and technically excellent teammates to join us and build the future of human-AI interactions in software.

The Role

We are looking for an Inference Runtime Software Engineer to push forward LM Studio's inference stack on-device and in the cloud. You will integrate new inference engines and runtime capabilities, bring up new open-weight models and modalities, and optimize model execution for a wide range of CPU and GPU targets. You will also contribute improvements to the open-source projects we build on.

Qualifications

  • Significant experience building production ML systems, inference runtimes, or performance-sensitive infrastructure
  • Strong programming ability in Python and C++
  • Deep understanding of transformer architectures and the mechanics of model inference
  • Experience profiling CPU or GPU workloads and reasoning about compute, memory, synchronization, and data movement
  • Experience with PyTorch and inference systems such as llama.cpp, MLX, ExecuTorch, vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM
  • Strong debugging instincts across model code, runtime internals, operating systems, and CPU or GPU execution
  • Takes personal responsibility for the correctness and performance of their work

Bonus Qualifications

  • Past contributions to open-source inference runtime projects such as llama.cpp, MLX, ExecuTorch, vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM

Responsibilities

  • Maintain and push forward our inference stack on-device and in the cloud
  • Bring up new model architectures and multimodal models
  • Improve latency, throughput, memory use, and reliability across CPU, CUDA, Metal, Vulkan, and ROCm runtimes
  • Build runtime capabilities for model loading, batching, scheduling, caching, and distributed execution
  • Benchmark and diagnose correctness and performance problems across the inference stack
  • Contribute upstream to open-source projects such as llama.cpp and MLX

Benefits

  • Competitive salary and equity grants
  • Great medical, vision, dental healthcare plans
  • Catered team lunch / expensed dinners in the office
  • Flexible PTO
  • Flexible WFH
  • Sun-drenched office in SoHo in NYC
PythonPyTorchLLMC++
$110K — 10th pctl $265K — 90th pctl
This role’s midpoint $250K vs. market median $180K for Engineering roles
+40%
above median
Based on 22,000+ Engineering roles with disclosed salary ranges tracked on NewJob.
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