Senior GPU Inference Performance Engineer

AMD AMD · Semiconductors · Santa Clara, CA · Engineering

Senior GPU Inference Performance Engineer at AMD responsible for end-to-end performance analysis of GPU-accelerated AI inference workloads. This role involves profiling, diagnosing, and explaining performance across the full stack (GPU silicon to software runtime) and driving competitive positioning against other accelerator vendors. Requires deep understanding of hardware, systems software, and AI serving frameworks.

What you'd actually do

  1. Full-stack GPU profiling: Instrument and analyze inference workloads across AMD Instinct (ROCm, rocProfiler, Omniperf) and NVIDIA (CUDA, Nsight Systems/Compute, DCGM) GPUs. Identify bottlenecks spanning HBM bandwidth, compute utilization, kernel scheduling, memory allocation, and PCIe/Infinity Fabric data movement.
  2. AI serving framework performance: Profile and optimize inference engines including vLLM, SGLang, and emerging serving runtimes. Understand KV-cache management, continuous batching, PagedAttention, speculative decoding, and quantization (FP8, MXFP4, INT4) effects on throughput and latency.
  3. Competitive performance analysis: Design and execute head-to-head benchmarks (AMD vs. NVIDIA) on standardized LLM workloads. Produce clear, data-backed explanations of _why_ performance differs — attributing gaps to specific hardware features (HBM bandwidth, compute density, interconnect topology), software maturity (kernel libraries, operator fusion, graph compilation), or configuration differences.
  4. Multi-server inference networking: Profile and optimize distributed inference topologies including prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation, pipeline parallelism, and tensor parallelism across multi-node clusters. Analyze network-level bottlenecks using RDMA/RoCE traces, NCCL/RCCL collective profiling, and NIC-level counters (Pensando, ConnectX). Quantify the impact of network latency, bandwidth, and congestion on end-to-end inference SLAs.
  5. GPU operator and Kubernetes stack: Profile the overhead introduced by GPU operators, device plugins, container runtimes (Docker, containerd), and Kubernetes scheduling on inference latency. Identify and resolve jitter, cold-start, and resource contention issues in production serving environments.

Skills

Required

  • GPU profiling
  • performance analysis
  • AI inference
  • LLM serving frameworks
  • quantization
  • multi-GPU and multi-node inference
  • Python
  • C/C++
  • HIP/CUDA

Nice to have

  • AMD ROCm
  • NVIDIA CUDA
  • ROCm profiler
  • Nsight Systems/Compute
  • vLLM
  • SGLang
  • RDMA/RoCE
  • NCCL/RCCL
  • Kubernetes GPU scheduling
  • MIG
  • GPU operator performance
  • open-source inference projects
  • open-source profiling projects

What the JD emphasized

  • Full-stack GPU profiling
  • AI serving framework performance
  • Competitive performance analysis
  • Multi-server inference networking
  • GPU operator and Kubernetes stack
  • vLLM
  • SGLang
  • quantization
  • multi-server inference
  • pipeline parallelism
  • tensor parallelism
  • RDMA/RoCE
  • NCCL/RCCL
  • Kubernetes GPU scheduling

Other signals

  • performance analysis
  • GPU inference
  • AI serving frameworks
  • competitive positioning
  • full stack