Senior/Staff System Research Engineer – LLM Inference Optimization

FDE Times; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Snowflake is seeking AI-native researchers and systems developers to join the AI Research team and advance the state of the art in LLM inference systems and optimization. You will work across the full inference stack, including distributed serving, runtime systems, GPU kernels, and model-system co-design, driving latency, throughput, and cost improvements.

You will collaborate with model researchers and infrastructure teams to productionize innovations, publish findings, and push the boundaries

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or related field; Master’s or PhD preferred.
• 5+ years in LLM inference systems, distributed AI systems, GPU systems, or HPC.
• Strong understanding of modern LLM inference architectures and tradeoffs for serving large-scale models.
• Hands-on experience with LLM inference and serving frameworks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM).
• Experience designing/optimizing inference runtimes: scheduling, batching, KV-cache, distributed execution, parallelism, disaggregated serving.
• Strong GPU architecture knowledge; experience with CUDA, Triton.
• Experience with performance-oriented libraries such as CUTLASS, cuBLAS, cuDNN.
• Experience profiling with Nsight Systems/Compute or similar tools.
• Ability to work independently, define questions, drive solutions amid ambiguity.
• Strong cross-team collaboration and communication.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop high-performance LLM inference systems across distributed serving, runtime systems, GPU execution, and kernels.
• Develop novel techniques to reduce latency, increase generation speed, throughput, and memory efficiency.
• Explore advanced inference techniques: speculative and parallel decoding, prefill/decode disaggregation, adaptive parallelism, and more.
• Build adaptive intelligent inference systems for new models, hardware, and workloads.
• Apply AI-native approaches to profiling, configuration search, and performance tuning.
• Identify high-impact performance issues and drive from research to production.
• Design distributed inference strategies across GPUs and nodes.
• Develop efficient multi-model serving, dynamic resource management, and workload-aware scheduling.
• Analyze and optimize GPU kernels for attention, MoE, and other components.
• Explore model-system co-design to unlock more efficient inference.
• Profile end-to-end workloads to identify bottlenecks across compute, memory, and networking.
• Collaborate with researchers, engineering, and product teams to deploy innovations.
• Open-source and publish innovations through blogs and conferences.

Skills

LLM inference systems

distributed AI systems

GPU systems

high-performance computing

profiling

model serving frameworks

experimental mindset

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering

Master’s degree or PhD preferred

Tools

vLLM

SGLang

TensorRT-LLM

CUDA

Triton

CUTLASS

cuBLAS

cuDNN

Nsight Systems

Nsight Compute

Job description

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done.

We are looking for talented systems developers and researchers to join the Snowflake AI Research team and advance the state of the art in LLM inference systems and optimization.

Our mission is to build the next generation of high-performance and intelligent inference systems. We optimize not only how fast and efficiently models run, but also how quickly inference systems can adapt to new models, architectures, hardware, and workloads.

Our work spans the full inference stack—from distributed serving and runtime systems to GPU kernels and model-system co-design. We explore techniques such as adaptive parallelism, speculative and parallel decoding, disaggregated inference, scheduling and batching, KV-cache optimization, model swapping, quantization, and GPU kernel optimization to push the frontier of latency, throughput, scalability, and cost.

Beyond optimizing individual models, we are building intelligent and adaptive inference systems that can automate performance optimization—rapidly profiling new models and workloads, identifying bottlenecks, selecting effective execution strategies, and adapting system configurations with minimal manual tuning. We embrace AI-native engineering, using AI not only as the workload we optimize, but also as a tool to accelerate system development, experimentation, debugging, optimization, and adaptation to new models. Our goal is to accelerate both the speed of inference and the agility of inference development.

This is an exciting opportunity to collaborate with a world-class team, including founding members of DeepSpeed, vLLM, and TensorFlow. Together, we will push the boundaries of AI systems and bring cutting-edge research into production-scale AI.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop high-performance LLM inference systems, spanning distributed serving, runtime systems, GPU execution, and performance-critical kernels.
• Develop novel techniques to improve inference latency, generation speed, throughput, memory efficiency, scalability, and cost.
• Explore advanced inference techniques including speculative and parallel decoding, prefill/decode disaggregation, adaptive parallelism, continuous batching and scheduling, KV-cache management, quantization, and communication optimization.
• Develop adaptive and intelligent inference systems that automatically optimize execution for new model architectures, hardware platforms, workload characteristics, and deployment environments.
• Apply AI-driven and AI-native approaches to systems engineering, including automated profiling, bottleneck identification, configuration search, code generation, experimentation, runtime strategy selection, debugging, and performance tuning.
• Independently identify high-impact performance and systems problems, formulate hypotheses, prototype solutions, and drive promising ideas from research through production.
• Design distributed inference strategies across GPUs and nodes, including tensor, sequence, pipeline, data, and expert parallelism.
• Develop efficient approaches for multi-model serving, dynamic resource management, model loading and swapping, and workload-aware scheduling.
• Analyze and optimize GPU kernels and operators for attention, MoE, communication, and other performance-critical model components.
• Explore model-system co-design, including model or post-training techniques that unlock substantially more efficient inference.
• Profile and benchmark end-to-end workloads to identify bottlenecks across compute, memory, communication, networking, scheduling, and model execution.
• Collaborate closely with model researchers, infrastructure teams, and product teams to deploy research innovations in production.
• Open-source and publish innovations through technical blogs and top-tier systems and machine learning conferences.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field. A Master’s degree or PhD is preferred.
• 5+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas: LLM inference systems, distributed AI systems, GPU systems, or high-performance computing.
• Strong understanding of modern LLM inference architectures and the performance tradeoffs involved in serving large-scale models.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLM inference and serving frameworks, such as vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, or similar systems.
• Experience designing, extending, or optimizing inference runtimes, including areas such as scheduling, batching, KV-cache management, distributed execution, parallelism, speculative decoding, or disaggregated serving.
• Strong understanding of GPU architectures and experience with CUDA, Triton, or similar GPU programming environments.
• Experience with performance-oriented libraries and frameworks such as CUTLASS, cuBLAS, cuDNN, or related technologies.
• Experience profiling and diagnosing end-to-end system performance using Nsight Systems, Nsight Compute, or equivalent tools.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as an independent problem identifier and solver—recognizing important problems with limited direction, defining the right technical questions, and driving solutions through ambiguity.
• Strong ability to work across model, runtime, distributed system, and hardware layers and reason about end-to-end performance tradeoffs.
• Experience using AI-native engineering approaches to accelerate software development, experimentation, debugging, optimization, or system adaptation is a strong plus.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across research, engineering, and product teams.

Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.

How do you want to make your impact?

For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com