Lead the developer-facing technical presence for Mercury models: ship runnable demos and benchmarks, author technical content, build integrations, engage developer communities (X, Discord, GitHub, HN, Reddit), represent the company at conferences, and partner with Marketing, Sales, Product, and Engineering to drive adoption and technical GTM.
Inception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Our Mercury model is the world’s fastest reasoning LLM and first commercially available diffusion LLM, delivering 5x greater speed and efficiency than today’s LLMs, with best-in-class quality.
We are the AI researchers and engineers behind such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO.
The OpportunityDiffusion for language is a new paradigm, and we're the team with the researchers who pioneered it. The developer conversation around this technology is only just beginning and we're looking for the person who will lead it.
This role is the public technical voice for the Mercury family of models. You'll ship runnable code, publish honest benchmarks, build integrations developers actually reach for, and set the standard for how the world understands diffusion LLMs. You'll own our developer-facing presence end-to-end from the technical blog to X to Discord. And you'll do it in partnership with the researchers who invented the underlying technology, with direct access to founders.
This is a broad role for someone who wants breadth. You'll write, ship, engage, benchmark, and represent Mercury across every surface where technical decisions get made. You'll partner with the Head of Marketing on technical content strategy, Sales on customer-facing technical initiatives, and Product and Engineering on demos and integrations that make Mercury the model developers reach for first.
If you want to define how a new category is understood and build a community around it, this is the seat.
Technical content and demos
- Ship a runnable technical artifact every ~2 days: a demo, a benchmark, a tutorial, an integration, or a technical blog post
- Author the technical blog cadence, a minimum of 2-3 quality technical posts per month, ideally more
- Build public demos that show Mercury's speed and capability on realistic developer workloads (voice, agents, search/RAG, coding)
- Publish honest benchmarks with reproducible methodology alongside our Eval team; own the response when public benchmarks are contested
- Contribute to product surfaces where developers land: playground, docs, integration guides, code samples
- Partner with Head of Marketing on content strategy as a co-author, not solo contributor: shared editorial calendar, joint decisions on what to prioritize and how it ladders to pipeline
Public voice — social and community
- Own Inception's developer-facing social presence end-to-end: X primarily, plus LinkedIn (technical audience side), Reddit (r/LocalLLaMA, r/MachineLearning), GitHub, Hacker News, developer Discord communities
- Show up proactively in the communities where our audience lives — not just respond to mentions, but participate in technical conversations, share work, engage with peers, spot signal
- Respond to technical questions, mentions, and debates in real time
- Represent Inception at conferences and industry events (GTC, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, industry meetups). Head of Marketing owns event logistics and coordination; you own the technical presence at them
- Build relationships with technical creators, DevRel counterparts at partner companies, and independent AI voices
GTM technical work
- Partner with Marketing for technical portions of compete pages: architecture arguments, benchmarks, reproducible comparisons
- Produce technical sales enablement: customer-facing benchmark deep-dives, POC support materials, technical case studies with paying customers
- Partner with sales on customer conversations where a technical voice materially moves the deal
- Partner with marketing on distribution, campaign integration, brand/enterprise-facing content, and cross-audience amplification (Head of Marketing owns marketing OKRs; DevRel contributes to them through the work above)
- Partner with product/eng on developer feedback, docs improvements, and API/product roadmap input from real-world usage
- Deep technical background. You have published or shipped substantial technical work in AI/ML – a widely-read blog, a well-maintained open-source project, research papers, or a track record of technical demos that developers actually cite.
- PhD, prior DevRel at a leading AI/ML company, or equivalent production engineering experience.
- You ship runnable code, not just content. Your writing is anchored to things that work. You'd rather publish a shorter post backed by a working demo than a long post backed by nothing.
- You have a public voice. A personal audience, a following, a body of work – something that shows you can hold attention in the technical AI community. Not required to be a "creator," but required to have credibility.
- You live in developer communities. X, Discord, Hacker News, GitHub, technical subreddits. These are where you already spend time. You have opinions about which AI labs handle developer relations well and why.
- You know the AI infrastructure landscape. You can hold your own on inference optimization, model architectures, benchmark methodology, and where the field is going. You have informed opinions on autoregressive vs. non-autoregressive approaches.
- You engage with rigor. You can hold a hostile HN thread without collapsing. You concede real limitations when they exist. You correct incorrect premises with facts, not defensiveness.
- You teach without condescension. You can write for a beginner and for a researcher, sometimes in the same piece.
- You're comfortable with breadth. This role spans technical content, public presence, and GTM-adjacent work. You partner with Marketing, Sales, Product, and Eng in the same week. If pure isolated research-DevRel is what you want, this isn't that role.
- Operator instinct. Startup pace, ambiguity, shipping rough drafts, iterating publicly.
The annual base salary range for this role is $175,000 – $300,000 USD. Final compensation is determined based on experience, skills, and qualifications. Equity and benefits are included in the total package.
Why Join Inception
- Work with World-Class Talent: Collaborate with the inventors of diffusion models and leading AI researchers
- Shape Foundational Technology: Your decisions will influence how the next generation of AI products are built and used
- Immediate Impact: Join at the ground floor where your contributions directly shape product direction and company trajectory
Perks & Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity in a rapidly growing startup
- Flexible vacation and paid time off (PTO)
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- 401k match
- Catered meals (breakfast, lunch, & dinner)
- Commuter subsidies
- A collaborative and inclusive culture
About Us
Inception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Today’s autoregressive LLMs generate tokens sequentially, which makes them painfully slow and expensive. Inception’s diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs) generate answers in parallel. They are 5x faster and more efficient, while delivering best-in-class quality.
Inception was co-founded by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, who co-invented such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO, UCLA professor Aditya Grover, who co-invented node2vec, decision transformers, and d1 reasoning, and Cornell professor and Afresh co-founder Volodymyr Kuleshov, who co-invented MDLM and Block Diffusion.
We pioneered the application of diffusion to language, with world’s first (and only) commercially available dLLM, Mercury. We are currently deploying our large-scale diffusion LLMs at Fortune 500 companies. Diffusion is the technology behind today’s image and video AI, and we’re making it the standard for LLMs as well.
Our team includes engineers from AWS, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft, HashiCorp, and OpenAI. Based in Palo Alto, CA, we are backed by top-tier venture capitalists, including Menlo Ventures, Mayfield, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Snowflake Ventures, Databricks, and Innovation Endeavors, and by tech luminaries such as Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy, and Eric Schmidt.
If you are talented, innovative, and ambitious, come help us invent the future of AI.
We are an equal opportunity employer and encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply.
Inception Palo Alto, California, USA Office
117 University Ave, Palo Alto, California, United States, 94301 1629
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