Overview

Inferact's mission is to grow vLLM as the world's AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster. Founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, we sit at the intersection of models and hardware, a position that took years to build.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Founding Product Designer to give Inferact and vLLM a distinct visual identity, sharp brand presence, and highly intuitive developer product experiences. This is a 0-to-1, full-stack design role for a creator with high aesthetic taste, deep technical curiosity, and an AI-native way of executing.

You will bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and visual craft. In your first 90 days, you’ll establish our visual language across high-visibility social assets, model launch campaigns, blog graphics, and partner announcements. As we scale, you’ll transition into shaping our web surfaces, brand identity, internal tooling, and core product interfaces. You’ll work directly with founders, engineering leads, product, and marketing to build design systems that scale across open-source communities, developer tools, and enterprise platforms.

30-60-90 Day Milestones

30 Days: Own and ship high-impact design assets for model launches, technical content, and ecosystem news. You’ll onboard to the inference ecosystem by establishing a baseline visual language for Inferact and vLLM.
60 Days: Expand into initial UI/UX designs for our production tooling and developer dashboards, while continuing to increase your design footprint across our core website, interactive developer pages, partner announcement assets, and i.
90 Days: Own the core design for our enterprise product: focus on core product design—refining UI/UX for developer tools, optimizing developer workflows, and establishing a unified design system from brand assets to product components.

Skills and Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in Product Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Science, Interactive Media, or a related field.
A strong portfolio or tech-forward personal website demonstrating exceptional craft, strong typography, layout, visual systems, and interactive UI/UX thinking.
AI-native operating style, using modern AI image, design, and code generators to explore concepts rapidly and ship production-ready assets.
High technical taste and fluency, with a track record of designing for developers, technical products, or complex systems.
End-to-end execution capability—able to take a rough idea or technical blog post and independently produce polished visuals, landing pages, or product mockups without needing prescribed steps.
Ability to collaborate credibly with technical founders, engineers, and product managers in a fast-paced, high-urgency startup environment.

Preferred qualifications:

Experience designing for developer tools, AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, open-source communities, or technical SaaS products.
Strong background in visual design, brand systems, illustration, or graphic assets alongside digital product design (UI/UX).
Proficiency with modern web design and front-end prototyping tools (Figma, Framer, Webflow, React/Tailwind code prototypes).
Experience designing graphics and collateral for major developer conferences, community events, and launch campaigns.

Bonus points if you have:

Motion design skills (After Effects, Rive, Lottie) or lightweight 3D design experience (Blender, Cinema 4D, Spline).
Built and maintained a personal tech-forward website or creative engineering projects showcasing custom interaction design.
Created 0-to-1 visual identities or design systems for a high-growth startup or prominent open-source project.

Logistics

Location: This role is based in San Francisco, California. Will consider remote in the US for exceptional candidates.

Compensation: Compensation is to be determined based on background, skills, and experience. Offers include equity.

Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas on a case-by-case basis.

Benefits: Inferact offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits as well as 401(k) company match.

About the company

Inferact builds AI inference infrastructure by maintaining vLLM, an open-source LLM inference engine, and offering a managed enterprise inference service. vLLM uses PagedAttention to optimize GPU memory, cutting inference costs and latency while preserving model quality. The company supports multiple architectures and hardware, aligns with PyTorch Foundation governance, and pursues open-source collaboration alongside a commercial platform. Its goal is to turn AI inference into a reliable, scalable operating layer of the AI stack, separating model deployment from application development.

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

Seed

Total Funding

$150M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2025

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

Inferact raised $150 million in January 2026 at an $800 million valuation.
TPU megakernel work reached 709 tokens per second on Kimi K3.
Open-source leadership keeps contributors flowing from Meta, Google, and Amazon ecosystems.

What critics are saying

NVIDIA Dynamo commoditizes vLLM, SGLang, and TensorRT-LLM beneath NVIDIA-controlled routing.
RadixArk and ZML target the same inference layer, compressing pricing power.
If managed inference lags open-source innovation, customers keep vLLM and skip Inferact.

What makes Inferact unique

Inferact owns vLLM, the default inference engine for 500-plus architectures.
Google partnered with Inferact on TPU vLLM support on September 14, 2026.
Inferact ships day-zero quantized releases like Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B with NVIDIA and AMD.

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Benefits

Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
401(k) Company Match

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

1 year growth

10%

2 year growth

10%

vLLM

Aug 12th, 2026

Day 0 support for Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B on vLLM.

Day 0 support for Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B on vLLM. vLLM Team and Inferact vLLM is announcing Day-0 vLLM support for Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B. This is the first model from the Qwen family to bring a Qwen-Max-class model to open-weight release. Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B is built on the Qwen 3.5 architecture and runs on vLLM out of the box. In addition to the official FP8 and BF16 checkpoints, Inferact has released MXFP4 and NVFP4-quantized weights that match full-precision quality while significantly reducing memory and bandwidth overhead. Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B is a 2.4-trillion-parameter sparse MoE model featuring 512 experts. Within its 92-layer hybrid backbone, full attention is applied at every 4th layer while the remaining 69 layers run linear attention. As one of the largest open-weight models released to date, running inference requires at least two NVIDIA B300 / AMD MI355X nodes (or a single node for the FP4 quantized version). Tl;dr. * Day-0 support: Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B reuses the Qwen 3.5 architecture and runs on vLLM from day one with no architecture changes required. * Flexible precision: FP8, BF16, NVFP4, and MXFP4 checkpoints are available. * Multi-vendor optimization: Validated across hardware partners including NVIDIA and AMD. Quick start. For NVFP4: For MXFP4: See the vLLM recipes for the full serving guide and recommended flags. FP4 quantization: quality at lower cost. To minimize inference costs and maximize GPU memory efficiency, the Inferact team quantized selected layers - including the routed experts - to FP4 weights using Round-to-Nearest (RTN) quantization with activation calibration to enable 4-bit activations. vLLM ran initial verifications to confirm that quantization accuracy remains intact. Note that increasing the reasoning budget is required to reproduce these evaluation results. | Benchmark | FP8 | NVFP4 | | GSM8K (strict / flexible) | 89.61% / 90.52% | 90.37% / 91.05% | | AIME25 @3 (avg / pass) | 87.78% / 93.33% | 92.22% / 96.67% | Optimizations. To enable efficient inference for this 2.4T parameter model, vLLM collaborated closely with NVIDIA and AMD to develop optimized kernels based on existing Qwen 3.5 support. On NVIDIA platforms, NVIDIA and Inferact co-developed ultra-fast kernels for Linear Attention (Gated Delta Rule), Attention (GQA), Dense GEMMs, and MoE routing. New fused kernels were added to reduce communication overhead. Significant effort was also dedicated to identifying the best decomposition of work to maximize performance, including combining Data Parallelism and Tensor Parallelism for Attention and Expert Parallelism for the MoE. On AMD Instinct GPUs, vLLM accelerates Qwen3.8 with AITER-fused Gated DeltaNet decode, attention, and MoE kernels, reducing kernel-launch and data-movement overhead. For Shared Expert MoE, the shared-expert path leverages highly optimized hipBLASLt GEMM kernels, while routed experts use AITER FusedMoE. AMD Quark quantization support enables efficient MXFP4 deployment, substantially reducing model memory requirements while maintaining strong accuracy. Deployment tips. The Qwen 3.8 model card recommends the following generation parameters for optimal performance: temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=0.0, repetition_penalty=1.0 Here is a Python client snippet to query the model once the vLLM server is running. Because Qwen 3.8 is a reasoning model, ensure you allocate a sufficient token budget for agentic workflows by setting a high max_tokens value. Acknowledgements. vLLM thank the Qwen team for releasing the model weights as well as their ongoing collaboration, and its hardware partners, NVIDIA and AMD, for their joint engineering contributions. vLLM also thank the Inferact team for delivering quantized checkpoints and end-to-end vLLM integration, as well as the broader vLLM community. Thanks for its inference partners, including DigitalOcean, Together AI, who helped with early testing.

TechCrunch

Jan 22nd, 2026

Inference startup Inferact lands $150M to commercialize vLLM | TechCrunch

The seed round values the newly formed startup at $800 million.

Inferact

Founding Product Designer

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