Software Engineer, River API - Palo Alto, CA, United States
$200,000 - $420,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 13 May 2026 by the employer.
About the role
Systems engineers in this role build high-performance engines to support model training and own the core infrastructure stack. Scope spans custom GPU kernel development to managing clusters of thousands of nodes.
What you'll do
- Architect and deploy fault-tolerant distributed systems for training and inference workloads across clusters with thousands of nodes. - Design high-performance kernels to maximize tensor operation efficiency, memory throughput, and networking over InfiniBand/RDMA. - Profile systems end-to-end to resolve blockers across hardware, software, data loading pipelines, and collective communication primitives. - Partner directly with research scientists to implement, optimize, and scale experimental model architectures.
What you'll need
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical industry experience. - Expertise in systems-level languages (C, C++, or Rust) with experience writing performant, maintainable code. - Foundation in computer architecture, memory management, and concurrent programming. - Debugging skills focused on complex, non-deterministic issues in distributed environments.
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience with modern AI frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX) and tooling for large-scale model training. - Familiarity with modern GPU architectures (NVIDIA/AMD) and hardware constraints (HBM bandwidth, PCIe limits). - Experience shipping and maintaining high-performance distributed systems or low-level software libraries.
Skills: distributed systems, GPU kernels, tensor operation, InfiniBand/RDMA, large-scale model training, AI frameworks
This role has been open 130 days — well above the 52-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
1010
|
Median days open
52 d
|
Median salary
$229k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | River | All employers we track in this specialty (1010 roles · 89 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 3 | 1010 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 7 | 6298 · 144 employers |
| Median days open | 41 d | 52 d (−11 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $229k |
Skills observed across this category: distributed systems, GPU kernels, tensor operation, InfiniBand/RDMA, large-scale model training, AI frameworks
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 290 open roles · median 51 d
- Qualcomm · 65 open roles · median 50 d
- AMD · 58 open roles · median 24 d
- Graphcore · 50 open roles · median 98 d
- Intel Corporation · 48 open roles · median 13 d
- Cerebras · 35 open roles · median 88 d
How we counted: 1010 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 89 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 23 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.
River
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