AI-First System Architect: AI/Hardware Visionary

Lumai Limited; Oxford; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Share option scheme

Pension

Private health insurance

Cycle to work

Development budget

Subsidised on-site lunches

25 days holiday

Social events

Job summary

Lumai Limited is redefining AI compute with a breakthrough optical accelerator for data centers. We are seeking a System Architect who thinks in AI first and hardware second, owning the architectural vision to bridge AI workloads with silicon and software execution.

You will sit at the intersection of leadership, hardware engineering, and software engineering—aligning product strategy with concrete architectural decisions and ensuring three teams move in unison.

Qualifications

• Deep, hands-on understanding of modern AI/ML workloads and their compute/memory access patterns.
• Proven experience defining system or chip architecture for AI/ML acceleration (inference/training).
• Ability to build and use analytical performance models to guide decisions.
• Strong communication skills for leadership, HW and SW teams.
• Experience bridging hardware and software boundaries including ISA, compilers, and runtime scheduling.

Responsibilities

• Define and own end-to-end system architecture from AI workload characterization to chip/microarchitecture trade-offs and software interfaces.
• Drive architectural decisions starting from AI model analysis and dataflow patterns.
• Develop and maintain architectural specs, performance models, and design docs as a single source of truth.
• Evaluate trade-offs with a quantitative, workload-grounded approach (latency, throughput, memory).
• Stay current with AI research and translate trends into architectural foresight.
• Act as technical bridge between leadership, hardware, and software teams; align roadmap with product strategy.
• Identify and resolve cross-team dependencies, track architectural milestones from pre-RTL to tape-out and post-silicon validation.

Skills

AI/ML workloads

System architecture

Performance models

Cross-functional comms

Hardware/software interfaces

RTL knowledge

Education

University degree or equivalent

Job description

Lumai Limited is redefining AI compute with a breakthrough optical accelerator for data centers. We are seeking a System Architect who thinks in AI first and hardware second, owning the architectural vision to bridge AI workloads with silicon and software execution.

You will sit at the intersection of leadership, hardware engineering, and software engineering—aligning product strategy with concrete architectural decisions and ensuring three teams move in unison.