Staff Software Engineer - GenAI Performance and Kernel

San Francisco, CaliforniaFull-TimeStaffSoftware Engineering

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As a staff software engineer for GenAI Performance and Kernel, you will own the design, implementation, optimization, and correctness of the high-performance GPU kernels powering our GenAI inference stack. You will lead development of highly-tuned, low-level compute paths, manage trade-offs between hardware efficiency and generality, and mentor others in kernel-level performance engineering. You will work closely with ML researchers, systems engineers, and product teams to push the state-of-the-art in inference performance at scale.

Lead the design, implementation, benchmarking, and maintenance of core compute kernels (e.g. attention, MLP, softmax, layernorm, memory management) optimized for various hardware backends (GPU, accelerators)
Drive the performance roadmap for kernel-level improvements: vectorization, tensorization, tiling, fusion, mixed precision, sparsity, quantization, memory reuse, scheduling, auto-tuning, etc.
Integrate kernel optimizations with higher-level ML systems
Build and maintain profiling, instrumentation, and verification tooling to detect correctness, performance regressions, numerical issues, and hardware utilization gaps
Lead performance investigations and root-cause analysis on inference bottlenecks, e.g. memory bandwidth, cache contention, kernel launch overhead, tensor fragmentation
Establish coding patterns, abstractions, and frameworks to modularize kernels for reuse, cross-backend portability, and maintainability
Influence system architecture decisions to make kernel improvements more effective (e.g. memory layout, dataflow scheduling, kernel fusion boundaries)
Mentor and guide other engineers working on lower-level performance, provide code reviews, help set best practices
Collaborate with infrastructure, tooling, and ML teams to roll out kernel-level optimizations into production, and monitor their impact

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, or a related field
Deep hands-on experience writing and tuning compute kernels (CUDA, Triton, OpenCL, LLVM IR, assembly or similar sort) for ML workloads
Strong knowledge of GPU/accelerator architecture: warp structure, memory hierarchy (global, shared, register, L1/L2 caches), tensor cores, scheduling, SM occupancy, etc.
Experience with advanced optimization techniques: tiling, blocking, software pipelining, vectorization, fusion, loop transformations, auto-tuning
Familiarity with ML-specific kernel libraries (cuBLAS, cuDNN, CUTLASS, oneDNN, etc.) or open kernels
Strong debugging and profiling skills (Nsight, NVProf, perf, vtune, custom instrumentation)
Experience reasoning about numerical stability, mixed precision, quantization, and error propagation
Experience in integrating optimized kernels into real-world ML inference systems; exposure to distributed inference pipelines, memory management, and runtime systems
Experience building high-performance products leveraging GPU acceleration
Excellent communication and leadership skills — able to drive design discussions, mentor colleagues, and make trade-offs visible
A track record of shipping performance-critical, high-quality production software
Bonus: published in systems/ML performance venues (e.g. MLSys, ASPLOS, ISCA, PPoPP), experience with custom accelerators or FPGA, experience with sparsity or model compression techniques

Databricks is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents the expected salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings for commissionable roles. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications and training, and specific work location. Based on the factors above, Databricks anticipates utilizing the full width of the range. The total compensation package for this position may also include eligibility for annual performance bonus, equity, and the benefits listed above. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page here.

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