Software Engineer, GPU Inference

About the Role

Cerebras is building a new generation of disaggregated AI inference systems that combine GPU-accelerated prefill with ultra-fast decode on the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine.

We are hiring a Software Engineer to productionize and optimize our GPU serving stack, working across our custom inference APIs, the vLLM serving runtime, the AMD ROCm software stack, and rack-scale AMD GPU infrastructure, to make this new serving path reliable, numerically correct, observable, and exceptionally performant.

You will write production code, establish operational practices for a new accelerator fleet, and drive improvements in time to first token, throughput, tail latency, and capacity efficiency. This is a hands-on role requiring deep debugging and optimization across application, runtime, distributed systems, and hardware layers.

Responsibilities

• Productionize the GPU inference stack. Design, build, deploy, and maintain the complete GPU prefill path, spanning API services, model-serving workers, vLLM, PyTorch, ROCm, GPU nodes, networking, and rack-scale infrastructure.
• Own GPU operational readiness. Establish deployment, upgrade, rollback, health-checking, capacity-management, and failure-recovery practices for the AMD GPU fleet. Build automation that makes driver, firmware, runtime, model, and container compatibility explicit and reproducible.
• Drive reliability in production. Define service-level indicators and objectives for GPU-backed inference. Improve fault isolation, graceful degradation, automated recovery, incident response, and post-incident remediation across the serving stack.
• Improve inference performance. Profile and optimize time to first token, request throughput, tokens per second per GPU, tail latency, GPU utilization, memory efficiency, and rack-level capacity under representative production workloads.
• Optimize model-serving behavior. Tune and improve scheduling, continuous batching, prefix caching, KV-cache management, tensor and expert parallelism, request admission, quantization, graph execution, and distributed communication.
• Debug across system layers. Diagnose complex failures and performance regressions across application code, vLLM, PyTorch, ROCm/HIP, collective communication libraries, kernels, drivers, firmware, networking, and hardware.
• Ensure numerical correctness. Build validation and regression infrastructure for model quality, numerical accuracy, precision changes, quantization, determinism, and compatibility across software and hardware releases.
• Build performance and correctness infrastructure. Develop representative benchmarks, workload replay tools, profiling automation, release qualification, dashboards, and regression gates. Turn one-off investigations into repeatable engineering systems.

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial individual-contributor ownership of complex production systems.
• Experience building, operating, or optimizing production inference systems for large language models, multimodal models, or similarly demanding GPU workloads.
• Strong programming ability in C++ and Python, including experience with multithreading, concurrency, memory management, and performance-sensitive software.
• Hands-on experience with a high-performance model-serving framework such as vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, Triton Inference Server, or an equivalent internally developed system.
• Strong understanding of GPU execution and performance, including asynchronous execution, memory movement, synchronization, kernel launches, communication overhead, and profiling methodology.
• Experience debugging distributed systems across multiple layers rather than treating the serving framework or accelerator runtime as a black box.
• Experience with Linux, containers, Kubernetes or comparable orchestration systems, observability, CI/CD, and operating latency-sensitive services in production.
• Ability to design rigorous benchmarks, interpret noisy performance results, identify bottlenecks, and translate findings into production improvements.
• Strong communication and technical leadership skills, with a demonstrated ability to drive ambiguous cross-functional projects to completion.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AMD Instinct accelerators and the ROCm ecosystem, including HIP, RCCL, rocprofiler, AMD SMI, AITER, hipBLASLt, Composable Kernel, or related libraries and tools.
• Deep CUDA experience that demonstrates an ability to transfer GPU systems knowledge across accelerator platforms.
• Experience modifying or contributing to vLLM, SGLang, PyTorch, Triton, TensorRT-LLM, or another open-source ML systems project.
• Experience optimizing prefill-heavy or disaggregated prefill/decode inference architectures.
• Understanding of KV-cache transfer, prefix caching, continuous batching, chunked prefill, request scheduling, and memory-aware admission control.
• Experience with multi-GPU and multi-node inference, including tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, expert parallelism, RDMA, collective communication, and failure handling.
• Experience optimizing Mixture-of-Experts or multimodal models.
• Knowledge of GPU kernel optimization, operator fusion, graph capture, attention kernels, GEMM tuning, and communication/computation overlap.
• Experience with reduced-precision inference and quantization formats such as BF16, FP8, FP4, INT8, or INT4, including validation of their numerical and model-quality effects.
• Experience building numerical-comparison, determinism, model-validation, or performance-regression test systems.
• Experience collaborating directly with accelerator vendors, framework maintainers, or open-source communities.