AI Performance Engineer — C++/Rust Systems Optimizer

Mercor; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Cincinnatus LLC is seeking talented Performance Engineers to join a leading AI lab's GenAI team. Your focus will be low-level optimization for AI training and inference infrastructure using C++, Python, and Rust, and you will contribute hands-on tasks to generate high-quality training data for frontier AI systems.

This is a 40-hour full-time W-2 engagement with placement at a premier AI lab, offering opportunities to impact latency, throughput, and memory footprint while collaborating with

Qualifications

• 2+ years of dedicated professional experience in performance engineering, systems programming, or low-level optimization.
• Deep hands-on expertise in C++, Python, or Rust with working familiarity across the others.
• Proven track record of measurable performance improvements on production systems.
• Demonstrable career progression.
• Ability to engage reliably for at least 40 hours/week during weekdays.
• Strong written communication skills to explain technical decisions clearly.

Responsibilities

• Guide research and engineering teams to improve AI model performance in systems-level optimization.
• Design tasks and write solutions to performance engineering problems.
• Evaluate tasks and provide clear, written technical feedback.
• Develop rubrics and evaluation frameworks for AI workloads.
• Collaborate with SMEs to ensure training data accuracy.

Skills

C++

Python

Rust

Job description

Cincinnatus LLC is seeking talented Performance Engineers to join a leading AI lab's GenAI team. Your focus will be low-level optimization for AI training and inference infrastructure using C++, Python, and Rust, and you will contribute hands-on tasks to generate high-quality training data for frontier AI systems.

This is a 40-hour full-time W-2 engagement with placement at a premier AI lab, offering opportunities to impact latency, throughput, and memory footprint while collaborating with