Machine Learning Senior Software Engineer

Role Description

Do you want to shape how AI models are validated, optimized, and deployed at global scale? Are you passionate about building the systems that ensure AI models perform reliably and responsibly in production? Join the Akamai Inference Cloud Team!

The Akamai Inference Cloud (AIC) team is part of Akamai's Cloud Technology Group. We design and operate AI platforms enabling customers to run models with unmatched performance, compliance, and economics. This team owns the end-to-end model lifecycle from validation and security scanning through quantization, optimization, and monitoring. We ensure every model meets rigorous standards for quality, safety, and performance.

As an ML Senior Software Engineer, you will build and operate systems responsible for model validation, quantization, and safety across the AIC. You'll develop pipelines that scan models for vulnerabilities, apply quantization and optimization techniques, and build guardrails that enforce safety and compliance policies. This role requires hands-on ML experience and deep understanding of modern architectures, inference optimization, and responsible AI.

• Developing and maintaining model validation and security scanning pipelines that assess models for quality, correctness, and vulnerabilities prior to deployment
• Implementing quantization, pruning, and other optimization techniques to reduce model footprint and improve inference latency across diverse hardware configurations
• Building guardrail and content safety systems that enforce compliance policies and mitigate risks such as jail breaking and prompt injection
• Designing model routing and prompt management infrastructure that supports intelligent request handling across model variants
• Contributing to model evaluation frameworks that measure accuracy, performance, and safety metrics across the model lifecycle

Qualifications

• 5 years of relevant experience and a Bachelor's/Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field
• Hands-on experience with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX, including model training, fine-tuning, and inference optimization
• Proficiency in model quantization techniques (GPTQ, AWQ, GGUF) and an understanding of how model compression impacts accuracy and latency
• Experience working with large language models (LLMs), transformer architectures, and multi-modal AI systems
• Familiarity with model safety and responsible AI practices, including content filtering, red-teaming, or adversarial robustness evaluation
• Proficiency in Python and experience building production data or ML pipelines
• Experience with containerized deployments, CI/CD practices, and cloud infrastructure (not required, but suggested)

Benefits

• Opportunities to grow, flourish, and achieve great things
• Benefits surrounding all aspects of your life:
• Your health
• Your finances
• Your family
• Your time at work
• Your time pursuing other endeavors
• Industry-leading benefits including healthcare, 401K savings plan, company holidays, vacation (in the form of PTO), sick time, family-friendly benefits including parental leave, and an employee assistance program focusing on mental and financial wellness

Company Description

Akamai powers and protects life online. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences helping billions of people live, work, and play every day. With the world's most distributed compute platform from cloud to edge, we make it easy for customers to develop and run applications, while we keep experiences closer to users and threats farther away.