Performance Engineer, AI Hardware & SoC Simulation

River AI Inc.; Austin, Palo Alto (TX, CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 420,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

Unlimited PTO

Relocation support

Job summary

River AI Inc. is seeking a Member of Technical Staff, Hardware, Performance Engineer in Austin/Palo Alto to architect and model high-performance AI accelerator hardware. You will develop simulators and work with RTL teams to explore ISA, kernels, and co-design optimizations.

The role requires 5+ years in hardware performance, expertise in C/C++, SystemC, and exposure to LLVM/GCC/XLA, CUDA/Triton, and performance profiling tools. Competitive salary with visa sponsorship available.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in EE/CE/CS with 5+ years in hardware performance roles.
• Expert in C/C++ or SystemC; understanding of compilers (LLVM/GCC/XLA).
• Experience with CUDA/Triton kernels and ISA interaction.
• Profile hardware with performance counters and trace tools.
• Collaborative, able to co-design across teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement high-performance hardware models in C++/SystemC.
• Perform micro-architectural exploration and evaluate architectural changes.
• Characterize workloads and stress-test hardware models.
• Co-design HW/SW with compiler/kernel teams for efficient mapping.
• Validate models against RTL/pre-silicon emulators for accuracy.
• Identify system bottlenecks from ILP to bandwidth limits.

Skills

C/C++

SystemC

LLVM/GCC/XLA

CUDA/Triton

Computer Architecture

Performance profiling

Collaboration

Education

B.S. in Electrical/Computer Engineering or Computer Science

Tools

QEMU

RTL/Emulator tooling

Job description

River AI Inc. is seeking a Member of Technical Staff, Hardware, Performance Engineer in Austin/Palo Alto to architect and model high-performance AI accelerator hardware. You will develop simulators and work with RTL teams to explore ISA, kernels, and co-design optimizations.

The role requires 5+ years in hardware performance, expertise in C/C++, SystemC, and exposure to LLVM/GCC/XLA, CUDA/Triton, and performance profiling tools. Competitive salary with visa sponsorship available.