Staff Mojo Compiler Engineer

Modular, a Qualcomm company; United States; Hybrid; USD 216,000 - 372,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

RSU grants

Team onsite events

Excellent benefits

Job summary

Modular, a Qualcomm company, is seeking a technical leader to drive the Mojo compiler backend from IR lowering to code generation for heterogeneous hardware. You will lead backend engineers, define design reviews, and set technical standards while mentoring junior team members.

You will also grow Mojo tooling, including debuggers, and collaborate with cross-functional groups across language, kernel, and hardware teams to ship high-performance solutions.

Qualifications

• Deep, hands-on compiler experience with IR design, optimization passes, and code generation in production toolchains.
• Strong experience with LLVM and MLIR, comfortable across dialects and lowering pipelines.
• Track record of technical leadership without formal management: leading projects and growing engineers.
• Excellent collaboration and communication across distributed teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for the Mojo compiler backend across devices and architectures.
• Act as tech lead for a backend compiler team, setting standards and driving design reviews.

Skills

Compiler backend

IR design

Code generation

C++

Python

Debugger tooling

Mentoring

Open source collaboration

Performance profiling

Team leadership (IC)

Tools

LLVM

MLIR

LLDB

GDB

VS Code

Job description

About Modular

At Modular, a Qualcomm company, we’re on a mission to revolutionize AI infrastructure by systematically rebuilding the AI software stack from the ground up. Our team, made up of industry leaders and experts, is building cutting-edge, modular infrastructure that simplifies AI development and deployment. By rethinking the complexities of AI systems, we’re empowering everyone to unlock AI’s full potential and tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

About Modular

At Modular, a Qualcomm company, we’re on a mission to revolutionize AI infrastructure by systematically rebuilding the AI software stack from the ground up. Our team, made up of industry leaders and experts, is building cutting-edge, modular infrastructure that simplifies AI development and deployment. By rethinking the complexities of AI systems, we’re empowering everyone to unlock AI’s full potential and tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

If you’re passionate about shaping the future of AI and creating tools that make a real difference in people’s lives, we want you on our team. You can read about our culture and careers to understand how we work and what we value.

About The Role

This is a technical leadership (IC) role in collaboration with the compiler engineering manager; you will be driving the technical roadmap for the Mojo compiler backend, creating new features, proposing new ideas, driving code reviews and leading design documents. Mentoring other engineers is a key element of this role.

Although your primary focus is the compiler backend code generation and lowering across multiple devices and architectures, you will also grow the Mojo tooling capabilities, in particular the debugger. This is where your mentoring and technical leading skills will shine: You will be driving junior engineers working in tooling, training them and helping them grow and lifting the team's overall capability there.

LOCATION: Candidates based in the US, Canada, and UK are welcome to apply. You can work in our office in Los Altos, CA, or Edinburgh, or remotely from home. Onboarding for new hires is conducted in-person at the appropriate office.

What You Will Do

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for the Mojo compiler backend: IR lowering, optimization passes, and code generation targeting heterogeneous hardware. In Mojo, this spawns from MLIR all the way to LLVM backend or custom compilers.
• Act as tech lead for a team of backend compiler engineers, breaking down ambiguous problems, driving design reviews, setting technical standards, and multiplying the team's output.
• Drive performance: use and extend profiling tools to find optimization opportunities, then design the compiler passes that capture them.
• Lead the team's developer-tooling effort, debuggers (LLDB and the GDB family), profilers, debug-info generation, and data introspection / visualizers — and bring other engineers up to speed as contributors and owners in that space.
• Steer the editor and language-tooling experience in partnership with the rest of the compiler team, where the boundary between the language server (LSP) and the IDE extension is deliberately blurry.
• Partner across the Mojo language, MAX, kernel, and hardware-enablement teams, and engage Modular's open-source community.
• Mentor engineers, raise the technical bar, and influence direction beyond your immediate team.

What You Bring To The Table

• Deep, hands-on compiler experience;IR design, optimization passes, and code generation in a production toolchain.
• Strong experience with both LLVM and MLIR — comfortable across dialects, lowering pipelines, and codegen.
• A track record of technical leadership without formal management: leading projects, setting architecture, and growing other engineers.
• Strong C++ and Python.
• Hands-on experience with debuggers in the LLDB and GDB family; not just using them, but ideally extending or building debugger support for a language or runtime.
• Familiarity with editor/IDE tooling, language servers (LSP), VS Code extensions, or comparable developer-experience surfaces.
• Working knowledge of CPU and/or GPU/accelerator architecture and the perf-analysis mindset that goes with it.
• Excellent collaboration and communication across distributed, cross-functional teams.

Helpful, But Not Required

• Experience working in open source projects, user-facing SDK or community driven projects, actively involved in user interactions and requirement capture
• Solid command of profilers and performance analysis (e.g. Linux perf, LLVM XRay, or comparable sampling/instrumentation tooling).
• Accelerator backend code generation — experience targeting GPUs or custom AI accelerators at the codegen level.
• Graph compiler experience — building or optimizing graph-level compilation (e.g., XLA, TVM, or comparable ML compiler stacks).
• GPU debugging — hands‑on with cuda-gdb and/or ROCgdb, readable symbol mangling and backtraces, and visualizing GPU data types (distinct from GPU codegen).
• Contributions to upstream LLVM/MLIR or other open-source compiler communities.

What Modular Brings To The Table

• Amazing Team. We are a progressive and agile team with some of the industry’s best engineering and product leaders.
• World-class Benefits. In order to attract the best, we need to offer the best. Your benefits package may include comprehensive healthcare coverage, retirement and savings programs, employee stock purchase opportunities, paid time off, wellbeing resources, family support programs, and learning and development opportunities. Please note that specific benefit packages may vary based on your location, you can read more about benefits offered by Qualcomm here.
• Competitive Compensation. We offer very strong compensation packages, including RSU grants. We want people to be focused on their best work and believe in tailoring compensation plans to meet the needs of our workforce.
• Team Building Events. We organize regular team onsites and local meetups in Los Altos, CA as well as different cities. Traveling 2-4 times a year is expected for all roles.

Working at Modular will enable you to grow quickly as you work alongside incredibly motivated and talented people who have high standards, possess a growth mindset, and a purpose to truly change the world.

Working at Modular will enable you to grow quickly as you work alongside incredibly motivated and talented people who have high standards, possess a growth mindset, and share a purpose to fundamentally change how software is built for AI and accelerated computing.

The estimated base salary range for this role to be performed in the US, regardless of the state, is $216,000.00–$372,000.00 USD.

The estimated base salary range for this role to be performed in Canada, regardless of the province, is $207,000–$310,400.00 CAD.

The estimated base salary range for this role to be performed in the United Kingdom is £120,000.00–£206,400 GRB.

The salary for the successful applicant will depend on a variety of permissible, non-discriminatory job-related factors, which include but are not limited to education, training, work experience, business needs, or market demands. This range may be modified in the future. The total compensation for a candidate will also include annual target bonus, equity, and benefits, with equity making up a significant portion of total compensation.

For candidates who fall outside of the listed requirements, we nevertheless encourage you to apply, as we may have upcoming openings at lower or higher levels than the one advertised.

Modular is proud to emphasize an equal opportunity, safe environment for people to do their best work. Modular is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.

If you require reasonable accommodations to participate in the interview process, please let your recruiter know, and we will work with you to meet your needs in compliance with the ADA.

This employer participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. If E-Verify cannot confirm that you are authorized to work, this employer is required to give you written instructions and an opportunity to contact Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or Social Security Administration (SSA) so you can begin to resolve the issue before the employer can take any action against you, including terminating your employment. Employers can only use E-Verify once you have accepted a job offer and completed the Form I-9.

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