Senior LLM Inference Engineer

An active TS//SCI clearance with polygraph is required for this role

Bitwise is a leading provider of mission-focused intelligence solutions that advance national security for the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense. We're a small and growing company, so you can expect to hop in on the ground floor with us and be a consequential member of the team. You'll be more than a contract performer for us — you'll also be asked for ideas to improve our company and improve your career, and you'll contribute to our team culture.

We value growth and community above almost all else, so we gather regularly for game nights, happy hours, tech talks, and plenty more. We think you'll like it here!

Remember, Bitwise is not a cult.

Bitwise hires talented engineers who are driven by purpose and who value a culture of technical excellence, growth, and overall wellness. We deliver new and innovative intelligence solutions to our customers at the very forefront of our country's national security missions. And we do it every single day. Our work matters, and so will you.

We ask that every new hire be able to:

• Contribute meaningful thought leadership — if not right away, over time
• Interact with our customers and earn their confidence in your abilities
• Be detailed, even if that means taking a little more time to get it right
• Contribute their ideas and ideals to improve all aspects of our company
• Allow us to invest in their education so we both grow together

We're building the next generation of AI infrastructure to power innovation across our customer organization, and we need a senior software engineer to help lead the charge. In this role, you'll be instrumental in building and maintaining the foundation for customer AI capabilities while supporting a broader ecosystem of AI-enabled applications. Your focus will be ensuring access to the highest quality large language models across our inference software stack.

As a Senior Software Engineer – Inference, you'll take on significant technical and leadership responsibilities. You'll lead the evaluation, configuration, and deployment of inference models for our users, translating high-level stakeholder goals into engineering outcomes. You'll mentor engineers on our team, helping to grow development best practices and standards that elevate everyone's work. You'll develop in-house services and techniques to guarantee continual high-quality inference service for our customer, and you'll engage across teams to establish solid infrastructure for our services and integrate LLM-powered tools for user needs.

We move fast in this space — requirements shift as mission needs evolve and new technologies emerge. You'll be expected to keep sharpening your skills and learning to turn loosely defined problems into working solutions. You'll also collaborate with teammates on surge efforts to support short-term, high-priority inference needs, balancing hands-on engineering with leadership and coordination responsibilities.

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, or a B.S. in a technical discipline plus 8+ years of experience
• Proficiency with Python and/or other modern programming languages
• Experience with Argo CD and/or other CI/CD frameworks
• Experience with Kubernetes and Helm
• Experience with AWS or other cloud service providers
• Strong communication skills and demonstrated ability to mentor other engineers
• Excellent leadership and stakeholder management skills
• Ability to balance hands-on engineering with leadership and coordination responsibilities
• Experience with vLLM, LiteLLM, or similar inference-serving frameworks
• Experience with other LLM hosting frameworks and practices
• Experience supporting production software using Site Reliability…