Software Engineer – GPU Kernel San Francisco

FriendliAI Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working hours

Daily meals / snacks provided

Health insurance

Startup equity

Collaborative team environment

Job summary

FriendliAI Inc. is seeking a GPU Kernel Engineer to design, build, and optimize low-level compute kernels powering our GPU-accelerated AI inference platform. You will write GPU code for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, focusing on high throughput and low latency across models on Hugging Face.

You will collaborate with the engine and platform teams to deploy optimizations, benchmark performance, and push advances in mixed-precision kernels, quantization, and multi-modal workloads.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of GPU programming, HPC, or performance-critical systems.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
• Strong proficiency in CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs or ROCm/HIP for AMD GPUs.
• Deep understanding of GPU architecture and memory hierarchy.
• Proficiency in C++ and GPU profiling/optimisation.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimize high-performance GPU kernels for AI inference.
• Develop and maintain GPU code in CUDA and C++, including low-level assembly when needed.
• Implement reduced-precision and quantized kernels (FP8/FP4) for low-latency/high-throughput inference.
• Benchmark and ensure cross-vendor parity between NVIDIA and AMD hardware.
• Contribute to internal GPU libraries and tune performance-critical components.
• Accelerate multi-modal model pipelines and explore next-generation GPU features.

Skills

GPU programming

CUDA

C++

Performance tuning

HPC concepts

Profiling tools

Quantization

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS/CE/EE

Tools

CUTLASS

Triton

ROCm

CUDA toolkit

Job description

About the job

FriendliAI is looking for a GPU Kernel Engineer to design, build, and optimize the low-level compute kernels that power our large-scale, GPU-accelerated AI inference platform. You will be delivering world-class inference speed across NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. With our recent $20M funding, we are scaling our team to meet market demand.

This is a deeply technical, high-impact role where you will write GPU code, implement advanced optimizations. As part of our engine team, you will contribute directly to the company’s proprietary inference engine which supports over 600,000 models on Hugging Face. You will work with the inventors of continuous batching and collaborate with the platform team to deploy your work into production.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimize high-performance GPU kernels for AI inference (e.g., GEMM, attention, routing)

• Develop and maintain GPU code in CUDA and C++, including low-level assembly when needed

• Implement reduced-precision and quantized kernels (FP8/FP4) for low-latency or high-throughput inference

• Benchmark and ensure cross-vendor performance parity between NVIDIA and AMD hardware

• Contribute to internal GPU libraries and tune performance of performance-critical components

• Accelerate multi-modal model pipelines

• Investigate and integrate next-generation GPU features
  

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in GPU programming, HPC, or performance-critical systems

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field

• Strong proficiency in CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs or ROCm/HIP for AMD GPUs

• Deep understanding of GPU architecture: warps, threads, memory hierarchy, synchronization, and latency-throughput trade-offs

• Proficiency in C++

• Experience with GPU profiling and performance tuning

• Strong numerical background with understanding of precision trade-offs and quantization techniques

Preferred Experience

• Experience optimizing transformer, multi-modal, or Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures at the kernel level

• Familiarity with the latest GPU libraries and frameworks (CUTLASS, Triton)

• Inter-GPU communication programming experience

• Open-source contributions related to GPU performance or ML acceleration

• Research or conference presentations on GPU optimization, HPC, or numerical computing

Benefits

• Flexible working hours

• Daily lunch and dinner provided; unlimited snacks and beverages

• Supportive and highly collaborative work environment

• Health check-up support and top-tier equipment/hardware support

• A front-row seat to the generative AI infrastructure revolution

• Competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits.

About FriendliAI

FriendliAI is building the world’s best AI inference platform that makes large language and multi-modal models fast, efficient, and deployable at scale. We power high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide and integrate directly with Hugging Face, giving developers instant access to over 600,000 open-source models.

We are a small, fast-moving team doing work that matters at one of the most exciting moments in the history of technology. With our world-class inference engine, we are building a platform that the AI industry can actually rely on.