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Staff Software Engineer - GenAI Performance and Kernel

Databricks

San Francisco, CaliforniaOn-siteFull-time

About this role

<p>P-1285</p> <h3><strong>About This Role</strong></h3> <p>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.</p> <h3><strong>What You Will Do</strong></h3> <ul> <li>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)</li> <li>Drive the performance roadmap for kernel-level improvements: vectorization, tensorization, tiling, fusion, mixed precision, sparsity, quantization, memory reuse, scheduling, auto-tuning, etc.</li> <li>Integrate kernel optimizations with higher-level ML systems</li> <li>Build and maintain profiling, instrumentation, and verification tooling to detect correctness, performance regressions, numerical issues, and hardware utilization gaps</li> <li>Lead performance investigations and root-cause analysis on inference bottlenecks, e.g. memory bandwidth, cache contention, kernel launch overhead, tensor fragmentation</li> <li>Establish coding patterns, abstractions, and frameworks to modularize kernels for reuse, cross-backend portability, and maintainability</li> <li>Influence system architecture decisions to make kernel improvements more effective (e.g. memory layout, dataflow scheduling, kernel fusion boundaries)</li> <li>Mentor and guide other engineers

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