Software Engineer, AI Gateway

About Vercel

Vercel gives developers the tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. As the team behind v0, Next.js, and AI SDK, Vercel helps customers like Ramp, Supreme, PayPal, and Under Armour build for the AI-native web.

Our mission is to enable the world to ship the best products. That starts with creating a place where everyone can do their best work. Whether you're building on our platform, supporting our customers, or shaping our story: You can just ship things.

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 Will 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.

About You

• 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

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package, including equity.
• Inclusive Healthcare Package.
• Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
• Flexible Time Off.
• We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.

Key skills/competency

• AI Gateway development
• Distributed Systems
• JavaScript/TypeScript
• API Integration
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Rate Limiting
• Failover Mechanisms
• Open Source Contribution
• Scalability
• Reliability Engineering
• AI/ML Integrations