Python SDK Engineer

About the role

We are investing heavily in our Python developer experience. As a Python SDK Engineer you’ll design new APIs and programming patterns, improve performance, work on packaging and release automation, and enable many thousands of developers to run customizable AI workloads entirely on-device.

Your work will focus initially on two of our open-source Python projects:

lmstudio-python – our MIT-licensed Python SDK that exposes local chat, completion, embeddings, agentic .act() workflows, model life-cycle management, and more.

venvstacks – a layered-virtual-environment toolchain that lets us ship reproducible Python runtimes and applications (this is how we ship our [ MLX Engine ]( https://github.com/lmstudio-ai/mlx-engine)).

Key responsibilities

Design & build new Python SDK features — chat, completion, embeddings, agentic workflows, structured output, speculative decoding, multi-GPU settings, and more, always keeping API ergonomics first-class.

Contribute tovenvstacks CLI & core library — evolve sub-commands lock, build, publish, local-export), dependency-resolution algorithms, and archive formats for deterministic, multi-layer builds.

Packaging & distribution — collaborate on many-linux, macOS universal2, and Windows wheels; automate CI/CD releases to PyPI and internal artifact stores; keep binary sizes lean.

Performance engineering — profile and optimize token throughput, memory use, streaming latency, and cross-process IPC between the LM Studio daemon and Python clients.

Developer experience & docs — write clear docstrings, Sphinx guides, examples, and blog posts; triage GitHub issues and review community pull requests.

Cross-team collaboration — work daily with desktop-app, TypeScript-SDK, and core-eng teams to ensure consistent behavior across languages and platforms.

Minimum qualifications

• Passion for local LLMs (you’ve already experimented with LM Studio or similar tools).

• 3+ years professional Python development, including packaging for PyPI or internal indexes.

• Solid OS & networking fundamentals (process isolation, sockets/WebSockets, file permissions, GPU drivers).

• Excellent problem-solving skills and written/spoken communication.

• Familiarity with Pydantic, asyncio, multiprocessing, and gRPC or HTTP/2 streaming protocols.

• Prior work on SDKs or CLI developer-tools with public APIs and semantic-versioning discipline.

• Mastery of Python internals (GIL mechanics, byte-code execution, import system, C-API/PyO3).

Preferred qualifications

• Proven open-source contributor with a track record of thoughtful PRs, issues, or design docs.

• Deep understanding of virtual-environment tooling venv, pipx, pdm, pip, wheels) and dependency resolution.

About Element Labs

Element Labs is an AI software company based out of New York, USA. We build LM Studio, a desktop application and developer platform for building on-device AI applications. Our mission is to make local AI accessible, useful, and ubiquitous. We are looking for teammates who want to take a huge swing at this mission with us.

Compensation Range: $175K - $275K