Senior Software Engineer, AI Inference Performance

Nvidia

Confirmed live yesterday High trust

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
Santa Clara, CA
Salary
$184,000–$287,500 / yr
Employment
Full-time
Posted
29 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live yesterday

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $176k
This role $236k
$100k $308k
below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 91% of similar roles. Most pay $149,500–$203,500 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $236k versus about $176k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Nvidia

Nvidia is a leading designer of graphics processing units (GPUs) and system-on-chip units, powering gaming, professional visualization, data centers, and artificial intelligence workloads. Industry: Semiconductors & AI Computing

Nvidia currently has 1626 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $184,000–$287,500 across 1115 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Senior Software Engineer, AI Inference Performance

The Senior Software Engineer - AI Inference Performance joins the team to advance innovative LLM and VLM inference by pushing workloads toward practical performance limits on GPU-accelerated systems. This role involves leading end-to-end analysis of inference processes, defining workloads, and optimizing latency, throughput, and KV-cache capacity. You will build and optimize performance-critical kernels for attention, matrix multiplication, and mixture-of-experts routing while eliminating bottlenecks in host code, memory, and communication. Key technologies include Python, Rust, C++, CUDA, CUTLASS, and Triton. You will utilize NVIDIA Nsight Systems, Nsight Compute, and PyTorch Profiler to convert profiles into testable hypotheses. The work focuses on improving production deployments by balancing performance and accuracy across distributed runtimes, model parallelism, quantization, and speculative decoding for large-scale accelerated computing.

What does a Software Engineer earn in California?

Median $214500 from 1223 postings across 76 companies.

See salary data

What you'll do

  • Analyze end-to-end LLM and VLM inference processes to optimize latency, throughput, and processing efficiency.
  • Build speed-of-light and roofline models to quantify performance headroom and identify optimization hypotheses.
  • Profile workloads using tools like NVIDIA Nsight Systems and PyTorch Profiler to eliminate bottlenecks in host code and CUDA kernels.
  • Tune serving hyperparameters including batching, KV-cache management, quantization, and speculative decoding.
  • Develop and optimize performance-critical kernels for attention, matrix multiplication, and mixture-of-experts routing using CUDA or Triton.
  • Establish repeatable benchmarks and performance regression gates to ensure consistent production quality.
  • Contribute high-quality code improvements to open-source inference engines like TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, and SGLang.

What we're looking for

  • More than 6 years of experience in full-stack LLM/VLM inference performance involving models, serving, distributed runtimes, kernels, and hardware.
  • Strong programming skills in Python, Rust, and/or C++.
  • Hands-on experience with CUDA or another GPU programming environment.
  • Demonstrated expertise in speed-of-light analysis, roofline models, microbenchmarks, and tools including NVIDIA Nsight Systems and Nsight Compute.
  • Deep understanding of GPU architecture, including Tensor Cores, memory hierarchy, caches, occupancy, synchronization, and numerical formats.
  • Understanding of distributed systems and networking for accelerated computing, including collectives, topology, and scale-up/scale-out performance.
  • BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
  • Contributions to high-performance AI projects like TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, SGLang, PyTorch, CUDA, Triton, or NCCL (preferred).

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