Lead Software Engineer, Kernels - Mountain View, CA, United States
$250,000 - $600,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 13 July 2026 by the employer.
About the role
MatX is seeking a hands-on engineering TLM to lead the Kernel team, managing engineers while designing and implementing high-performance compute kernels for specialized AI hardware. You will collaborate with hardware engineering to co-design AI architectures and partner with ML teams to optimize workloads.
What you'll do
- Manage, mentor, and build a team of highly specialized kernel engineers and software developers. - Design and optimize kernels that interface directly with hardware. - Work in partnership with ML Research and Hardware Engineering teams. - Provide expertise and guidance on hardware architecture from a programmer's perspective, ensuring seamless integration with the software stack.
What you'll need
- 2+ years of engineering team management experience and 7+ years of experience working directly within engineering teams. - Bachelor of Computer Science or equivalent degree. - Experience optimizing software for specialized hardware using techniques such as parallelism, SIMD programming, C, assembly-level optimization, or GPU/CUDA programming. - Proficiency in at least one language among assembly, C++, C, Zig, or Rust. - Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, manage escalations, and align stakeholders around infrastructure decisions. - Experience translating complex technical trade-offs to stakeholders.
Nice to have
- Experience implementing kernels for ML models such as Transformers. - Experience using and implementing distributed parallelism techniques such as AllReduce, AllToAll, data parallelism, or tensor parallelism. - Familiarity with how compilers work.
Skills: kernels, hardware architecture, ML research, optimization, cuda programming
This role has been open 99 days — well above the 50-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
988
|
Median days open
50 d
|
Median salary
$235k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | MatX | All employers we track in this specialty (988 roles · 87 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 5 | 988 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 35 | 6222 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 35 d | 50 d (−15 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $235k |
Skills observed across this category: kernels, hardware architecture, ML research, optimization, cuda programming
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 286 open roles · median 47 d
- Qualcomm · 62 open roles · median 50 d
- AMD · 56 open roles · median 21 d
- Intel Corporation · 45 open roles · median 13 d
- Graphcore · 44 open roles · median 95 d
- Cerebras · 38 open roles · median 85 d
How we counted: 988 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 87 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 20 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.