Staff Software Engineer, GPU Inference

Cerebras Cerebras · Semiconductors · Toronto, ON · Software

Staff Software Engineer focused on productionizing and optimizing a GPU inference serving stack, including custom APIs, vLLM, ROCm, and AMD GPU infrastructure. The role involves deep debugging and performance optimization across multiple system layers to improve metrics like time to first token, throughput, and latency for large language models and multimodal models.

What you'd actually do

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of software engineering experience
  • substantial individual-contributor ownership of complex production systems
  • 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
  • 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
  • asynchronous execution, memory movement, synchronization, kernel launches, communication overhead, and profiling methodology
  • Experience debugging distributed systems across multiple layers
  • 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
  • demonstrated ability to drive ambiguous cross-functional projects to completion

Nice to have

  • 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 memor

What the JD emphasized

  • production inference systems for large language models, multimodal models, or similarly demanding GPU workloads
  • 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
  • Experience debugging distributed systems across multiple layers
  • 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

Other signals

  • productionize and optimize GPU serving stack
  • custom inference APIs
  • vLLM serving runtime
  • AMD ROCm software stack
  • rack-scale AMD GPU infrastructure
  • time to first token, throughput, tail latency, and capacity efficiency
  • deep debugging and optimization across application, runtime, distributed systems, and hardware layers