Fast-Track Runtime & Performance Engineer

Desert Ant Labs; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Office in Amsterdam

Remote work option

Job summary

Desert Ant Labs seeks a developer to optimize models for Apple platforms, Android, and Windows, shaping the Swift core and platform bindings. You will push workloads to GPUs and Neural Engines, and design SDK APIs to maximize speed on diverse devices.

You will write Metal/WebGPU kernels when needed and collaborate with researchers to advance model architectures for real devices, contributing to a fast, robust SDK.

Qualifications

• Experience speeding software on real hardware and profiling performance.
• Shipped an SDK or runtime used by developers.
• Able to read compiler output and profiler traces.
• Write Swift with C interop and bindings to other languages.
• Work in C, C++, Kotlin, or Rust where a platform needs it.
• Knowledge of GPUs/ML accelerators and kernel programming.
• Contributed to llama.cpp, MLX, or ONNX Runtime.

Responsibilities

• Run as much of each model on the Neural Engine, NPU, or GPU as the hardware allows.
• Build the shared Swift core and its bindings to Kotlin, WebAssembly, and native code: memory budgets, routing, and fallbacks.
• Write Metal, WebGPU, or native kernels when a runtime runs slowly; you may write the first ones.
• Collaborate with researchers on model architectures that run fast on real devices.

Skills

Swift

Kotlin

C++

Rust

WebAssembly

Tools

Metal

DirectX

WebGPU

ONNX Runtime

llama.cpp

MLX

Job description

Desert Ant Labs seeks a developer to optimize models for Apple platforms, Android, and Windows, shaping the Swift core and platform bindings. You will push workloads to GPUs and Neural Engines, and design SDK APIs to maximize speed on diverse devices.

You will write Metal/WebGPU kernels when needed and collaborate with researchers to advance model architectures for real devices, contributing to a fast, robust SDK.