About this role
Job title: Software Engineer, AI Gateway
About the Role As a member of the AI Gateway Team, you will be responsible for developing and enhancing our AI Gateway platform, which provides a unified API for accessing hundreds of AI models from multiple providers. You will collaborate with a remote and distributed team of engineers to build reliable, low-latency systems that handle rate limiting, intelligent failovers, and seamless integrations, enabling developers to ship AI-powered applications without managing provider-specific complexities. This role focuses on ensuring production-ready reliability for AI workloads, including automatic fallbacks during outages and consistent performance across providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more.
What You'll Do
- Contribute to the design, implementation, and maintenance of the AI Gateway platform, emphasizing features like unified API endpoints, rate limit management, and intelligent failover mechanisms to boost uptime and reliability.
- Write clean, efficient, and well-documented code, conducting thorough testing to ensure low-latency responses and stability for high-volume AI inference requests.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product managers, AI researchers, and infrastructure engineers, to integrate new AI providers and models while addressing scalability and performance challenges.
- Engage with the open-source community, contribute to AI SDK and related projects, and align with Vercel's ethos of fostering developer tools.
- Gather user feedback and analytics to drive innovations in AI Gateway, such as enhanced billing unification, provider-agnostic authentication, and analytics for usage insights.
What We're Looking For
- You have at least 5+ years of relevant experience
- Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript and experience with backend development, APIs, and cloud infrastructure
- Experience with AI/ML integrations, API gateways, distributed systems, or handling high-throughput services (e.g., rate limiting, caching, failovers)
- Experience contributing to or participating in open source projects
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a collaborative team environment
Nice to Have
- Optional/preferred qualifications (only if mentioned)
Compensation & Benefits
- Salary: $196,000 - $294,000 USD per year (San Francisco base pay range). Actual salary will be based on job-related skills, experience, and location. Compensation outside of San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location.
- Benefits: Competitive compensation package, including equity; Inclusive Healthcare Package; Learn and Grow – mentorship and events; Flexible Time Off; WFH budget for space setup.