Senior Staff Software Engineer, Serving

At Liftoff, we’re solving one of the core problems faced by every mobile app: growth. To do so, we build Machine Learning and Big Data-driven technology that can accurately predict which apps a user will like, and connect them in a compelling way. Our systems operate at a scale unseen outside of the largest Internet companies -- processing over 12 million requests per second and interacting with over 5 billion unique users each day.
The Serving team builds and maintains the mission-critical infrastructure responsible for serving ads across Liftoff’s product line.

As an engineer on Liftoff’s Accelerate Serving team, you will:

• Design, build, and operate the high-throughput, low-latency services that receive bid requests, execute Liftoff’s bidding logic, and respond to ad exchanges in real time.
• Improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of systems that process millions of requests per second under strict latency constraints.
• Develop and optimize GPU-powered inference services that execute neural network models using TensorRT.
• Profile end-to-end inference pipelines to identify and eliminate bottlenecks in GPU utilization, batching, memory access, serialization, networking, and request handling.
• Partner with machine learning engineers to productionize new model architectures and features, translating modeling requirements into efficient and reliable serving implementations.
• Design and operate large feature store fleets that provide low-latency access to real-time and precomputed features.
• Develop benchmarking and performance-analysis tools that help engineers compare models, understand latency and throughput trade-offs, and identify regressions before deployment.
• Improve experimentation tooling that allows machine learning teams to orchestrate offline training runs, evaluate candidate models, and maintain model leaderboards.
• Own changes through their full lifecycle—from system design and implementation to testing, deployment, observability, capacity planning, incident response, and continued optimization.

Requirements: 

• Strong core Computer Science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, system architecture)
• 10+ years of industry experience
• M.S.. or higher in Computer Science (or equivalent work experience)
• Experience with Go is a plus

Location:

This role is eligible for full-time remote work in one of our entities: CA, CO, ID, IL, FL, GA, MA, MI, MN, MO, NJ, NV, NY, OR, PA, TX, UT, and WA

We are a remote-first company with US hubs in Redwood City, Los Angeles, and New York City.

Travel Expectations:
We offer several opportunities for in-person team gatherings, including but not limited to project meetings, regional meetups, and company-wide events. We expect our employees to attend these gatherings at least once per quarter. These gatherings provide essential opportunities for collaboration, communication, and team building.

Compensation:
Liftoff offers all employees a full compensation package that includes equity and health/vision/dental benefits associated with your country of residence. Base compensation will vary based on the candidate's location and experience.

The following are our base salary ranges for this role: 

• SF Bay Area, NYC, Los Angeles/Orange County: $255,000 - $310,000 
• Seattle/Olympia, Austin, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Boston: $234,000 - $285,000 
• All other cities and towns in our approved states: $219,000 - $266,000 

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