Platform Engineer - Inference

About Subconscious

Agents are eating the economy, but it's still the early days. Token usage is increasing 2,500% year over year, agents token consumption is growing 7x faster than humans, and adoption of agentic systems is on the rise across professions. All signs point to these trends continuing, as agentic workloads become irreplaceable across software, cybersecurity, legal, finance, HR, sales, and science tasks. We are building the foundation.

Subconscious is an inference provider specifically designed to power long-running agents. For tasks that consume 200k+ tokens, our inference system delivers unparalleled speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency. As agents proliferate, Subconscious will be a provider in every agent stack.

About the role

You will provide the battle-tested infrastructure experience needed to scale our platform to hundreds of thousands of users. Today, we serve billions of tokens per day. With your contributions, we'll serve trillions.

This is a ground-floor role. You will shape the product, technology, and engineering culture. We expect the person who fills this role to grow into a leadership position.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability, performance, observability, uptime, load balancing, and security of inference workloads.
• Work closely with our research team to make new inference optimizations and open source model support broadly available to customers.
• Contribute to the technical direction of our inference platform including major architecture and build vs. buy decisions.
• Help build the product factory that makes our team ship code like a team 10x our size - including human-driven process, CI/CD, and agent guardrails.
• Establish durable engineering culture through design docs, architecture reviews, mentorship, and hands-on implementation.

You will work across our inference stack, from the user-facing platform to GPU cache optimization.

Role requirements

• 5+ years in Platform, Infrastructure, or Inference engineering roles
• Experience running Kubernetes at scale
• Experience running AWS at scale
• Deep observability experience - including Datadog (Prometheus and Grafana are a plus)
• Expert in deployment jujitsu - zero downtime, rollbacks, blue/green, canary, etc. - we want someone with battle scars
• Proficient in Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and GitOps workflows
• Experience with SDLC security and compliance processes
• Staff-level judgment - you can define ambiguous problems, make pragmatic tradeoffs, influence without authority, and leave both systems and teams better than you found them. You can tell a good story with data.
• Product sense - you solve problems by working backwards from the end-user and business requirements.
• You have character, a sense of humor, and compassion. You are someone we are excited to introduce to our partner.

Nice to have

• You have worked in startups before
• You have worked on AI systems that serve trillions of tokens per day
• Experience with vLLM, SGLang, or NVIDIA Dynamo
• Experience with BYOC (bring your own cloud) implementations
• Experience with SOC 2 - ideally having contributed to achieving compliance
• Experience with GCP or Azure
• Experience with agent-driven software delivery at scale

Location

We are based in Boston, MA, and are in the office 5 days a week. For an exceptional candidate, we are willing to consider remote work.

Compensation

We can't build this company without you, and we want you to be a meaningful owner alongside us. Your equity will reflect that.

Salary will be between $180k-$230k with significant equity ownership.

Benefits

We offer full medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus unlimited PTO. We order Shy Bird on Wednesdays in the office.

Work authorization

Candidates must be currently authorized to work in the United States without employer sponsorship. At this time, we are unable to provide immigration or visa sponsorship.