Staff AI Application Engineer — Remote & Heterogeneous Compute

Axelera AI; Schweiz; Hybrid; CHF 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension plan

Extensive employee insurances

Employee stock options

Job summary

Axelera AI is seeking a Staff AI Application Engineer to build and optimize our model enablement platform. You will decide how each model runs across AIPU and accelerators, shaping end-to-end performance for Voyager SDK users.

The role spans frontend, graph compiler, runtime, and application pipeline work, with hands-on engineering and collaboration with graph compiler and runtime teams. Experience with AI agents and model bring-up is valued.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience in systems, compilers, runtimes or performance.
• Hands-on experience with heterogeneous computing across CPU, GPU, DSP, NPU or FPGA.
• Solid fundamentals in computer architecture, operating systems and parallel programming.
• Familiarity with ML graph representations and compiler concepts: graph capture (torch.export, FX, ONNX), lowering, operator fusion, partitioning, memory planning.
• Strong C++ and Python.
• Daily use of AI coding agents on real engineering work, with the judgment to review and test their output.

Responsibilities

• Model enablement platform and agent harness: Build the platform that engineers and AI agents use to bring up models: reusable tools to partition, compile, run and profile; environments with access to real hardware; closed-loop runs that apply a change, measure it against the reference and repeat; and verification integrated into CI.
• Model ingestion: Capture, analyse and split PyTorch/ONNX models across AIPU units and accelerators with placement tags readers can override.
• Heterogeneous execution: Extend split to large models, cascades and multi-model pipelines with expert offloading and caching.
• End-to-end performance: With the application and runtime teams, bring each model to its best end-to-end performance: overlap host and device work, zero-copy buffers, batching, multi-core scheduling.
• Critical models: Study models that matter to customers and turn lessons into platform improvements.

Skills

C++

Python

Parallel programming

Computer architecture

Systems & runtimes

AI coding agents

Tools

MLIR

TorchInductor

ONNX Runtime

CUDA

OpenCL

Vulkan

Job description

Axelera AI is seeking a Staff AI Application Engineer to build and optimize our model enablement platform. You will decide how each model runs across AIPU and accelerators, shaping end-to-end performance for Voyager SDK users.

The role spans frontend, graph compiler, runtime, and application pipeline work, with hands-on engineering and collaboration with graph compiler and runtime teams. Experience with AI agents and model bring-up is valued.