Senior Software Engineer - AI Inference Performance

We Love AI Jobs; Santa Clara, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 184,000 - 357,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

On-site work

Job summary

NVIDIA is seeking a Senior Software Engineer – AI Inference Performance in Santa Clara, CA to push LLM/VLM workloads toward practical performance limits on GPU-accelerated systems.

You will analyze workloads, profile CUDA kernels and host code, and tune batching, KV-cache, and quantization. Collaboration across model, kernel, and network teams will be essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of experience in full-stack LLM/VLM inference performance.
• Proficient in Python, C++, or Rust and GPU programming (CUDA).
• Experience with profiling tools (Nsight Systems/Compute) and benchmarking.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end analysis of LLM/VLM inference workloads.
• Profile host code, CUDA kernels, memory, and scheduling to reduce latency.
• Build repeatable benchmarks and contribute improvements to inference engines.

Skills

Python

C++

Rust

GPU performance profiling

LLM/VLM inference optimization

Distributed systems

GPU architecture

Education

Bachelor's or Master's Degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

CUDA

CUTLASS

Triton

TensorRT-LLM

vLLM

PyTorch

Nsight Systems

Nsight Compute

Job description

# Senior Software Engineer - AI Inference PerformanceNVIDIAUS, CA, Santa ClaraFull-time$184,000 – $356,500 / yearAI tools:PyTorchTensorRT-LLMvLLMSGLangCUDACUTLASSTritonUpload your resume once and Scout applies for youApply with ScoutShare this job:LinkedInXSave imageThis engineer will optimize large language and vision-language model inference on NVIDIA GPU systems. The work spans performance analysis, serving software, distributed runtimes, and GPU kernels, with results intended to improve production deployments and future platforms.* Permanent* On-site* More than 6 years* Bachelor's or Master's Degree, or equivalent experience### Skills and expertisePythonCUDAC++RustGPU performance profilingLLM/VLM inference optimizationDistributed systemsGPU architecture### Key responsibilities* Analyze and optimize LLM and VLM inference workloads for latency, throughput, and efficiency.* Profile workloads and improve host code, CUDA kernels, memory, communication, and scheduling.* Build repeatable benchmarks and contribute performance improvements to inference engines.## How this job comparesCompared with 410 open senior machine learning jobs on October 10, 2026.Pay: This job pays $184K to $357K a year. The 143 open senior machine learning jobs that publish US pay start at $186K on average, so this job starts in line with them.Similar open jobs: We Love AI Jobs lists 410 open senior machine learning jobs at 176 companies.Remote work: This job is on site. 90 of the 410 senior machine learning jobs (22%) are remote.AI in this role: High. AI is the core of the work: building, training or deploying AI systems. The role directly optimizes inference for LLMs and VLMs, including serving techniques and model execution. Hands-on work with AI inference performance is the core of the position.## Full descriptionNVIDIA is the platform upon which every new AI-powered application is built. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer – AI Inference Performance to advance innovative LLM and VLM inference. You will push workloads toward practical performance limits on NVIDIA GPU-accelerated systems. Your work will span models, serving software, distributed runtimes, communication, CUDA kernels, and GPU architecture. Deliver measurable gains in latency, throughput, efficiency, and scale.This is a hands-on role for an engineer who turns performance models and profiler data into working code. You will collaborate with model, framework, kernel, networking, and GPU architecture teams. You will contribute improvements to open-source inference engines and develop methods that others can reproduce. Your work will improve production deployments and help build future NVIDIA platforms.What you'll be doing:• Lead end-to-end analysis of LLM/VLM inference processes. Define representative prefill and decode workloads. Optimize time to first token, inter-token latency, P99 end-to-end latency, processing efficiency, and key-value (KV) cache capacity. For multimodal models, isolate preprocessing, encoder, and decoder costs.• Build speed-of-light and roofline models to quantify performance headroom. Connect arithmetic intensity, bandwidth, occupancy, memory hierarchy, and communication costs to clear optimization hypotheses.• Profile workloads using NVIDIA Nsight Systems, Nsight Compute, PyTorch Profiler, and custom instrumentation. Eliminate bottlenecks in host code, CUDA kernels, memory, communication, and scheduling.• Tune serving hyperparameters and techniques such as batching, KV-cache management, quantization, speculative decoding, CUDA Graphs, and model parallelism. Choose them based on workload, hardware, model quality, and service-level objectives.• Build and optimize performance-critical kernels, including attention, matrix multiplication, mixture-of-experts routing, quantization, and data movement. Use CUDA, CUTLASS, Triton, or related technologies.• Establish repeatable benchmarks, canonical run records, and performance regression gates. Manage aspects such as model, precision, hardware, topology, software, features, and workload; Balance between performance and accuracy. Collaborate across with various teams and contribute high-quality upgrades to TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, SGLang, or associated projects.What we need to see:• More than 6 years of experience in full-stack LLM/VLM inference performance involving models, serving, distributed runtimes, kernels, and hardware. Your efforts result in measurable gains in production or production-representative environments.• Strong programming skills in Python, Rust and/or C++, plus hands-on experience with CUDA or another GPU programming environment.• Demonstrated expertise in speed-of-light analysis, roofline models, microbenchmarks, and tools including NVIDIA Nsight Systems and Nsight Compute. You convert profiles into testable hypotheses and validated progress.• Deep understanding of GPU architecture, including Tensor Cores, memory hierarchy, caches, occupancy, synchronization, and numerical formats across hardware generations.• Practical experience optimizing inference servers and model execution. You can choose techniques for the workload, including batching, scheduling, KV-cache management, quantization, speculative decoding, and various parallelism strategies• Understanding of distributed systems and networking for accelerated computing. You can reason about collectives, topology, and scale-up versus scale-out performance.• BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.Ways to stand out from the crowd:• Contributions to one or more high-performance AI projects. Examples include TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, SGLang, PyTorch, CUDA, Triton, or NCCL.• Experience developing AI-agent-supported performance workflows that automatically gather and analyze profiles, identify bottlenecks, explore serving configurations, or produce optimized runtime and kernel code. You validate generated changes through reproducible, human-reviewed tests for performance, model quality, and correctness.• Published research, conference presentations, technical talks, or blog posts that clearly explain inference performance methods and results.• Delivered advancements for new LLM or VLM architectures, long-context inference, mixture-of-experts models, multimodal pipelines, or large-scale distributed serving.Successfully carrying these out will shape the future of AI inference performance!With competitive salaries and a generous benefits package (www.nvidiabenefits.com ), we are widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers. We have some of the most forward-thinking and hardworking people in the world working for us and, due to outstanding growth, our best-in-class engineering teams are rapidly growing. If you're a creative and autonomous engineer with a real passion for technology, we want to hear from you!