Senior Staff Engineer - ML Inference
Remote - Americas
Step into the engine room of Agentic Commerce! Imagine owning the bleeding edge of machine learning at Shopify, where your acceleration, optimization, and scaling of ML inference will shape the experience of millions of merchants, and influence how commerce AI is done worldwide. We’re seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to architect, optimize, and own the high-performance runtime that transforms innovative models into production breakthroughs. Your work will be the engine behind our real-time AI systems, driving game-changing cost and latency reductions, and enabling rapid launches of intelligent features that keep Shopify (and our merchants) years ahead. Join a remote-first team of world-class experts, experiment fearlessly, and see your code move the needle for some of the largest-scale ML workloads in commerce.
Responsibilities
Architect, optimize, and own Shopify’s production ML inference. Designing for high throughput, ultra-low latency, and global reliability.
Leverage and extend technologies like CUDA, TensorRT, Triton, TVM, and custom GPU kernels to deliver state-of-the-art performance and efficiency at scale.
Partner with ML, infrastructure, and product teams to seamlessly deploy, benchmark, and scale cutting-edge models powering our platform.
Drive cost optimization and system efficiency, reducing cloud spend and carbon footprint by orders of magnitude without sacrificing model quality.
Lead deep performance investigations, apply advanced techniques (pruning, quantization, distillation, batching), and implement robust solutions for serving models in production.
Set technical strategy and culture for ML inference across Shopify, mentoring others and collaborating with global AI pioneers.
Qualifications
Proven, hands-on expertise in building and optimizing large-scale ML inference systems, with measurable performance and cost wins.
Deep experience in production model serving, runtime optimization, and acceleration. Especially leveraging GPUs (CUDA, TensorRT) and high-performance deep learning infrastructure.
Strong software engineering skills (Python, C++, and/or other relevant languages) with a robust systems and distributed computing mindset.
Demonstrated leadership in architecting or scaling reliable, real-time inference at scale, handling millions of queries per day.
Track record of cross-functional impact: working closely with ML research/engineering, infra, and product teams to deliver production results.
Advanced understanding of model compression, quantization, efficient deployment, and tradeoffs between speed, cost, and accuracy.
Nice to Haves
Open source contributions to inference frameworks (TensorRT, TVM, Triton, DeepSpeed, ONNX, etc.) or technical talks/publications at leading AI conferences.
Experience optimizing inference across a variety of hardware (NVIDIA, AMD, ARM, cloud TPUs).
Familiarity with building or integrating robust monitoring, observability, and auto-scaling for inference platforms.
Experience with modern MLOps pipelines and methodologies.
Prior experience in e-commerce, large-scale product infra, or globally distributed inference workloads.
At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly—not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you're ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a live pair programming session, come prepared with your own IDE.
Engineering. It’s our DNA.
Engineering isn't a department at Shopify. It's our DNA. The engineers who thrive here care about the code, the system, and the merchants relying on both. They want hard problems and uncomfortable growth. They find solutions without waiting for permission. They ship weekly. They want commerce to work better for everyone. So does our founder, Tobi, who still codes and still shapes where this thing is going.
They're open source nerds. They pair program because two brains write better code than one. New tools, new models, new approaches. They experiment constantly. Most of what's standard here started as someone hacking on something.
They use AI like a keyboard, reflexively and everywhere, to clear the mundane and make room for thinking. And they work in the open. The fastest way to learn here is to watch someone better than you do the work. If that sounds like you, come build with us.
Infrastructure engineering
Infrastructure Engineers at Shopify build and maintain the systems that handle millions of requests per second and billions of dollars in transactions. At that scale, performance gains matter and weak assumptions surface quickly. Your systems power the experience for millions of entrepreneurs and buyers every minute of every day, including peak events like Black Friday.
Engineers at Shopify spend the majority of their time actually writing code to build and improve infrastructure. You’ll solve problems that don’t exist anywhere else, with challenges that push what’s possible. If that lights you up, come build with us.
Mastery-matched compensation.
~Mastery
At Shopify, getting better at your craft and increasing your impact is how you grow. Twice a year, we assess both in our ~Mastery cycle, Shopify’s performance review. Achieving higher ~Mastery is a promotion, and when you earn a promotion your total rewards grow with it. Crafter and manager are equal paths, so you can pursue excellence in the craft you’re best at.
Total Rewards
With Flex Comp, your Rewards Wallet gives you agency over your compensation mix. Adjust your mix of cash, restricted share units, and stock options (including programs like Long-Term Equity)* to where it makes sense for you, and mix it up anytime as life and priorities change. Buying a house? Want more skin in the game? Just experimenting? It’s your call.
* Flex Comp program offerings vary based on location, role, and employment type. Full details are set out in our Terms & Conditions and related plan documents.
Room for the rest of your life.
Flexible work, remote by design
A flexible vacation policy means most Shopifolk can take the vacation days they feel they need to recharge.
If a change of everyday scenery is more your jam, Destination 90 means you can work from (almost) anywhere in the world for 90 days of the year.
Your setup
Your battlestation is your home base. Request the desk, chair, and AV gear you need to get shit done.
Benefits
You need ‘em, we’ve got ‘em. Our health and welfare benefits may include health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance depending on your country. If you’re in a country without a package, you'll receive a monthly allowance. We also offer mental health support for you and your dependents, including immediate and confidential services like counseling and coaching sessions.
Family support
We offer fertility benefits globally, along with paid parental leave to welcome a new family member.
Show us your craft.
The Life Story is how we understand the themes of your career journey so far, human to human. What you’ve learned, and how you made a difference. Show us the trophies and the bruises: the problems you’ve solved, the challenges you encountered, the decisions you made, and the lessons you learned along the way.
We’re looking for world-class crafters. Crafters obsessed with pursuing excellence in their field. Our craft assessment looks at your personal journey toward mastery, and your potential to go broader and deeper in novel ways.
You’ll start with an online assessment, followed by a craft assessment. Show us what you do best, and how you do it. Shopify’s bar is high, and code wins arguments around here. Let your skills do the talking.
Building on your craft assessment, these interviews dive deeper into your experience and technical aptitude. Depending on the role, this may include technical deep dives focusing on projects you've previously worked on, collaborating in a design critique, exploring a dataset using SQL, or taking the lead on solving a problem with your interviewer as your co-pilot.