Neuronify

Inference

Running a trained model to produce outputs. For deployed AI products it is where most of the compute bill, and most of the latency, comes from.

Hiring data as of September 20, 2026 · refreshed daily

companies naming it
14 of 47companies naming it
open roles naming it
37open roles naming it
of those based in NYC
19of those based in NYC
median posted base (n=13)
$238kmedian posted base (n=13)

What Inference means

Inference is the act of using a model, as opposed to training it. Every API call to a language model is inference. For a product in production it dominates cost, because training happens once and inference happens on every request.

Inference engineering is its own specialty: batching requests to keep GPUs busy, caching repeated context, quantizing weights, choosing serving frameworks such as vLLM or TensorRT, and trading latency against throughput. The economics are moving fast enough that purpose-built inference hardware is now a category.

Inference in New York job posts

14 of the 47 New York AI companies we track name Inference in at least one open role today, across 37 postings. 19 of those are based in New York; the rest are remote or in the companies’ other offices.

This is engineering vocabulary: 68% of the postings that name it are Engineering roles.

How to read it

Counted only where the posting also names serving, latency, GPUs, or similar, to exclude the statistical sense of the word. A posting centered on inference is a systems role, strong on performance engineering and GPU behavior.

What these roles pay

$225k25th percentile
$238kMedian
$275k75th percentile

Midpoints of 13 distinct salary ranges posted on New York roles that name Inference. Base salary only; on-target earnings are excluded, and a range repeated across one company’s postings counts once. For comparison, the median across all New York engineering postings is $215k. A term’s pay reflects the roles that name it as much as the skill itself — see the role mix below before reading a premium into it. Full bands by function and seniority are in the NYC salary calculator.

Trend

We began extracting this term from posting text on September 20, 2026. Job descriptions disappear when a role is filled, so the series cannot be backfilled; a trend line appears here once a week of data exists.

Who names it

Open roles naming Inference, by company.

  • Modal11
  • AlphaSense6
  • Runway4
  • Normal Computing3
  • Hebbia2
  • Patlytics2
  • Pinecone2
  • ElevenLabs1
  • Headway1
  • Hume AI1
  • K Health1
  • Mirage (fka Captions)1

Also: Ramp, SmarterDx.

Which roles

The same postings, by function and by seniority.

  • Engineering25
  • Research8
  • Product2
  • GTM1
  • Other1
  • Mid19
  • Staff/Principal10
  • Senior4
  • Entry2
  • Manager1
  • Director1

Named alongside Inference

Terms that appear in the same postings far more often than chance would put them there. The number is how many of the 14 companies pair the two.

Open roles naming Inference

A sample from today’s data, New York roles first and one per company before any repeats. Links go to the employer’s own posting. For the full market, see AI jobs in NYC.

On the AI in NYC Show

How this is counted

Every day we read the open roles on the public job boards of the New York AI companies in our coverage — the NYC AI 100 and the AI in NYC Show roster. This term is matched against each role’s description after removing the text a company repeats across its postings, so an “About us” paragraph cannot tag every role the company has open. A vendor’s own postings never count toward its own name.

The figure means named in a job posting. It does not mean used in production, and a “nice to have” counts the same as a requirement. Companies are the headline number because posting counts are dominated by whichever few employers are hiring hardest this month.

Full method, including the pay rules, is on the glossary index; the underlying series is the NYC AI Hiring Index.

Inference — common questions

What does Inference mean in an AI job posting?

Running a trained model to produce outputs. For deployed AI products it is where most of the compute bill, and most of the latency, comes from. Counted only where the posting also names serving, latency, GPUs, or similar, to exclude the statistical sense of the word. A posting centered on inference is a systems role, strong on performance engineering and GPU behavior.

How many New York AI companies are hiring for Inference?

As of September 20, 2026, 14 of the 47 New York AI companies we track name Inference in the description of at least one open role, across 37 postings (19 based in New York). The count refreshes daily from the companies’ own job boards.

What do roles that ask for Inference pay in New York?

Across 13 distinct posted salary ranges on New York roles naming Inference, the median midpoint is $238k base, with the middle half between $225k and $275k. The same figure for all New York engineering postings is $215k. These are employer-posted ranges required by New York’s pay transparency law, base salary only.

Which skills are asked for alongside Inference?

In the same postings, the terms most distinctively paired with Inference are Quantization and distillation, GPUs, CUDA, Multimodal AI, Fine-tuning. We rank pairings by how much more often they appear together than apart, so near-universal terms such as Python do not crowd out the informative ones.

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