Tech Lead, Gemini Inference Performance, DeepMind

Google; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Google is seeking a senior leader to set the technical roadmap for a team of performance engineers, focusing on optimizing ML frameworks, kernels, and serving infrastructure. You will collaborate with researchers to balance latency, memory, and cost, guiding impactful optimizations across large-scale systems.

The role requires substantial experience in software leadership, performance analysis, and deep knowledge of Transformer/MoE architectures, with a push to deliver high-impact improvements

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years in people management/leadership roles.
• 5 years in technical leadership overseeing projects.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical roadmap for a team of performance engineers and drive prioritization of optimization opportunities.
• Leverage roofline analysis, hardware-level profiling, and systems analysis to identify bottlenecks across ML frameworks and serving infrastructure.
• Apply first-principles understanding of Transformer and Mixture-of-Experts components to optimize execution efficiency and memory footprint.
• Collaborate with research teams to evaluate inference implications and model how architecture affects latency and serving costs.
• Guide development of custom kernels and serving optimizations; conduct deep profiling of accelerator utilization and memory bandwidth.

Skills

Performance engineering

Team leadership

ML frameworks

Profiling tools

Transformer

Mixture of Experts

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's or PhD in Engineering/CS

Tools

Roofline analysis

Hardware profiling tools

ML frameworks

Custom kernels

Job description

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience in a people management, supervision/team leadership role.
• 5 years of experience in a technical leadership role and overseeing projects.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• 5 years of experience working in a complex, matrixed organization.

About the job

Artificial intelligence will be one of humanity’s most transformative inventions. At Google DeepMind, we are a pioneering AI lab with exceptional interdisciplinary teams focused on advancing AI development to solve complex global challenges and accelerate high-quality product innovation for billions of users. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, ensuring safety and ethics are always our highest priority.

We are pushing the boundaries across multiple domains. Our global teams offer diverse learning opportunities and varied career pathways for those driven to achieve exceptional results through collective effort.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical roadmap for a team of performance engineers, support and develop direct reports and drive prioritization across competing optimization opportunities — staying in the highest-leverage problems.
• Leverage roofline analysis, hardware-level profiling, and systems analysis to identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks across ML frameworks, compilers, custom kernels, and serving infrastructure on hardware accelerators.
• Apply a first-principles understanding of Transformer and Mixture-of-Experts model components to identify and prioritize opportunities to optimize their execution efficiency and memory footprint.
• Collaborate with research teams early in the development lifecycle to evaluate inference implications, modeling how architectural choices impact latency, memory footprint, and serving costs.
• Guide and contribute to the development of custom kernels and serving optimizations. Conduct deep performance profiling using hardware tracing tools to analyze accelerator utilization, memory bandwidth saturation, and interconnect latency across large-scale topologies.

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Google is a global company and, in order to facilitate efficient collaboration and communication globally, English proficiency is a requirement for all roles unless stated otherwise in the job posting.

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