Senior ML Engineer — LLM Inference at AfterQuery

Senior ML/Software Engineer (LLM Inference & Systems) | $100–150/hr | Worldwide Remote | Contract

AFTERQUERY is assembling a team of elite senior engineers to tackle one of the most compelling open problems in AI: evaluating how well frontier models reason about LLM inference systems, GPU-level performance optimization, and model-serving architecture. This is a high-impact research and evaluation role — not a traditional engineering position.

Rather than shipping production code, you'll be defining what "correct" and "excellent" look like for AI models solving the same class of systems-engineering problems you work on every day. You'll design evaluation scenarios, author reference solutions, and grade model outputs with expert-level precision.

What You'll Do

• Design rigorous evaluation scenarios centered on LLM inference and GPU systems engineering
• Write detailed reference solutions and technical explanations for complex systems problems
• Grade and provide structured feedback on AI-generated responses to real engineering challenges
• Help define quality standards for AI reasoning in highly technical domains

Required Qualifications

• 5–10 years of professional software engineering or ML systems experience
• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field
• Strong hands-on background in one or more of: GPU inference optimization, custom CUDA kernel development, model-serving systems (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang), quantization, or optimizer design
• Experience at a recognized technology or AI company with real systems-engineering ownership
• Excellent written communication skills — you'll be authoring technical explanations and feedback, not just code

This role is ideal for senior engineers who want to shape how AI understands the hardest problems in modern ML infrastructure.