TPU Kernel Engineer

About the role

As a TPU Kernel Engineer, you'll be responsible for identifying and addressing performance issues across many different ML systems, including research, training, and inference. A significant portion of this work will involve designing and optimizing kernels for the TPU. You will also provide feedback to researchers about how model changes impact performance.

Responsibilities

• Solve large-scale systems problems and low-level optimization
• Optimize ML systems for TPUs, GPUs, or other accelerators
• Provide feedback to researchers about model performance
• Implement low-latency, high-throughput sampling for large language models
• Adapt existing models for low-precision inference
• Build quantitative models of system performance
• Design and implement custom collective communication algorithms
• Debug kernel performance at the assembly level

Requirements

• Significant experience optimizing ML systems for TPUs, GPUs, or other accelerators
• Results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Qualifications

• Strong candidates will have a track record of solving large-scale systems problems and low-level optimization
• Experience with high performance, large-scale ML systems
• Experience designing and implementing kernels for TPUs or other ML accelerators
• Understanding accelerators at a deep level, e.g., a background in computer architecture
• Understanding ML framework internals
• Experience with language modeling with transformers

Skills

• Highly skilled in optimizing ML systems for TPUs, GPUs, or other accelerators
• Strong problem-solving skills
• Excellent communication skills
• Experience with pair programming
• Interest in the societal impacts of AI

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits
• Optional equity donation matching
• Generous vacation and parental leave
• Flexible working hours
• A lovely office space for collaboration

Pay

The annual compensation range for this role is $280,000—$850,000 USD.

Schedule

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa Sponsorship

We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

How We're Different

• We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science
• We work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts
• We value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles
• We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science
• We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time

Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage

Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.