Staff Software Engineer, GPU Inference

Cerebras; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Cerebras is building a disaggregated AI inference platform. We are hiring a Software Engineer to productionize and optimize our GPU serving stack, spanning vLLM, PyTorch, ROCm, and AMD GPU infrastructure.

You will work across API services, model-serving workers, and rack-scale systems to improve time-to-first-token, throughput, and capacity efficiency. The role requires deep debugging across application, runtime, distributed systems, and hardware layers, delivering reliable, observable, and

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience in production systems.
• Experience building or optimizing production inference systems for GPU workloads.
• Strong programming in C++ and Python with performance focus.
• Hands-on experience with vLLM, ROCm/HIP, PyTorch or similar frameworks.
• Understanding GPU execution, memory movement, and profiling.

Responsibilities

• Productionize and optimize the GPU inference stack across APIs and runtimes.
• Own deployment readiness, upgrades, health checks, and capacity management.
• Improve reliability with SLIs/SLOs and incident response processes.
• Profile and optimize time to first token, throughput, and tail latency.
• Tune scheduling, batching, and KV-cache for efficient model serving.
• Debug across application, runtime, and hardware layers to ensure correctness.

Skills

C++

Python

Distributed systems

Performance profiling

Linux

Containers

Kubernetes

Multithreading

GPU architectures

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE

Tools

vLLM

PyTorch

ROCm

HIP

Triton

CUDA

Job description

Cerebras Systems builds the world's largest AI chip, 56 times larger than GPUs. This architecture allows Cerebras to deliver industry-leading training and inference speeds; over 10 times faster than GPU-based hyperscale cloud inference services. This order of magnitude increase in speed is transforming the user experience of AI applications, unlocking real‑time iteration and increasing intelligence via additional agentic computation. Cerebras works with the leading model labs, global enterprises, and cutting‑edge AI‑native startups. OpenAI recently announced a multi‑year partnership with Cerebras, to deploy 750 megawatts of scale, transforming key workloads with ultra high‑speed inference.

About the Role

Cerebras is building a new generation of disaggregated AI inference systems that combine GPU‑accelerated prefill with ultra‑fast decode on the Cerebras Wafer‑Scale Engine.

We are hiring a Software Engineer to productionize and optimize our GPU serving stack, working across our custom inference APIs, the vLLM serving runtime, the AMD ROCm software stack, and rack‑scale AMD GPU infrastructure, to make this new serving path reliable, numerically correct, observable, and exceptionally performant.

You will write production code, establish operational practices for a new accelerator fleet, and drive improvements in time to first token, throughput, tail latency, and capacity efficiency. This is a hands‑on role requiring deep debugging and optimization across application, runtime, distributed systems, and hardware layers.

Responsibilities

• Productionize the GPU inference stack. Design, build, deploy, and maintain the complete GPU prefill path, spanning API services, model‑serving workers, vLLM, PyTorch, ROCm, GPU nodes, networking, and rack‑scale infrastructure.

• Own GPU operational readiness. Establish deployment, upgrade, rollback, health‑checking, capacity‑management, and failure‑recovery practices for the AMD GPU fleet. Build automation that makes driver, firmware, runtime, model, and container compatibility explicit and reproducible.

• Drive reliability in production. Define service‑level indicators and objectives for GPU‑backed inference. Improve fault isolation, graceful degradation, automated recovery, incident response, and post‑incident remediation across the serving stack.

• Improve inference performance. Profile and optimize time to first token, request throughput, tokens per second per GPU, tail latency, GPU utilization, memory efficiency, and rack‑level capacity under representative production workloads.

• Optimize model‑serving behavior. Tune and improve scheduling, continuous batching, prefix caching, KV‑cache management, tensor and expert parallelism, request admission, quantization, graph execution, and distributed communication.

• Debug across system layers. Diagnose complex failures and performance regressions across application code, vLLM, PyTorch, ROCm/HIP, collective communication libraries, kernels, drivers, firmware, networking, and hardware.

• Ensure numerical correctness. Build validation and regression infrastructure for model quality, numerical accuracy, precision changes, quantization, determinism, and compatibility across software and hardware releases.

• Build performance and correctness infrastructure. Develop representative benchmarks, workload replay tools, profiling automation, release qualification, dashboards, and regression gates. Turn one‑off investigations into repeatable engineering systems.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial individual‑contributor ownership of complex production systems.

• Experience building, operating, or optimizing production inference systems for large language models, multimodal models, or similarly demanding GPU workloads.

• Strong programming ability in C++ and Python, including experience with multithreading, concurrency, memory management, and performance‑sensitive software.

• Hands‑on experience with a high‑performance model‑serving framework such as vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, Triton Inference Server, or an equivalent internally developed system.

• Strong understanding of GPU execution and performance, including asynchronous execution, memory movement, synchronization, kernel launches, communication overhead, and profiling methodology.

• Experience debugging distributed systems across multiple layers rather than treating the serving framework or accelerator runtime as a black box.

• Experience with Linux, containers, Kubernetes or comparable orchestration systems, observability, CI/CD, and operating latency‑sensitive services in production.

• Ability to design rigorous benchmarks, interpret noisy performance results, identify bottlenecks, and translate findings into production improvements.

• Strong communication and technical leadership skills, with a demonstrated ability to drive ambiguous cross‑functional projects to completion.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AMD Instinct accelerators and the ROCm ecosystem, including HIP, RCCL, rocprofiler, AMD SMI, AITER, hipBLASLt, Composable Kernel, or related libraries and tools.

• Deep CUDA experience that demonstrates an ability to transfer GPU systems knowledge across accelerator platforms.

• Experience modifying or contributing to vLLM, SGLang, PyTorch, Triton, TensorRT-LLM, or another open‑source ML systems project.

• Experience optimizing prefill‑heavy or disaggregated prefill/decode inference architectures.

• Understanding of KV‑cache transfer, prefix caching, continuous batching, chunked prefill, request scheduling, and memory‑aware admission control.

• Experience with multi‑GPU and multi‑node inference, including tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, expert parallelism, RDMA, collective communication, and failure handling.

• Experience optimizing Mixture‑of‑Experts or multimodal models.

• Knowledge of GPU kernel optimization, operator fusion, graph capture, attention kernels, GEMM tuning, and communication/computation overlap.

• Experience with reduced‑precision inference and quantization formats such as BF16, FP8, FP4, INT8, or INT4, including validation of their numerical and model‑quality effects.

• Experience building numerical‑comparison, determinism, model‑validation, or performance‑regression test systems.

• Experience collaborating directly with accelerator vendors, framework maintainers, or open‑source communities.

Why Join Cerebras

People who are serious about software make their own hardware. At Cerebras, we have built a breakthrough architecture that is unlocking new opportunities for the AI industry. With dozens of model releases and rapid growth, we’ve reached an inflection point in our business. Members of our team tell us there are five main reasons they joined Cerebras:

1. Build a breakthrough AI platform beyond the constraints of the GPU.

2. Publish and open source their cutting‑edge AI research.

3. Work on one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.

4. Enjoy job stability with startup vitality.

5. Our simple, non‑corporate work culture that respects individual beliefs.

Find out more about what it's like to work at Cerebras here!

Cerebras Systems is committed to creating an equal and diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe inclusive teams build better products and companies. We try every day to build a work environment that empowers people to do their best work through continuous learning, growth and support of those around them.