Spring/Summer 2027 PhD AI Agentic/ML System Co-op - CA, San Jose, United States
Originally posted 5 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
As an Agentic/ML System Co-op, you will collaborate with research and engineering teams to explore techniques that improve the efficiency, scalability, and performance of open-weight large language models on modern hardware architectures.
What you'll do
- Contribute to agentic system design and software and hardware optimizations for machine learning workloads across AMD GPUs, vLLM, SGLang, and PyTorch.
- Collaborate with ML scientists, engineers, and architects.
- Document your findings and contribute to technical reports, presentations, and potentially research publications.
What you'll need
- Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field at a U.S.-based university.
- Proficiency in Python and/or C++, with exposure to performance profiling or optimization.
- General understanding of machine learning software stacks and large language models, including frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX and coding-agent harnesses.
- Demonstrated knowledge or experience in Agentic software engineering, agent-harness development and evolution, or agent and skill evaluation.
- Demonstrated knowledge or experience in Performance analysis, GPU architecture, GPU kernel development and debugging, or machine learning compilers.
Skills: Agentic/ML System, open-weight large language models, software and hardware optimizations, AMD GPUs, vLLM, SGLang, PyTorch, GPU kernel development
This role has been open 4 days — well below the 51-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
912
|
Median days open
51 d
|
Median salary
$229k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | AMD | All employers we track in this specialty (912 roles · 86 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 52 | 912 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 406 | 6078 · 146 employers |
| Median days open | 29 d | 51 d (−22 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $229k |
Skills observed across this category: Agentic/ML System, open-weight large language models, software and hardware optimizations, AMD GPUs, vLLM, SGLang, PyTorch, GPU kernel development
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 250 open roles · median 49 d
- Qualcomm · 60 open roles · median 61 d
- AMD (this employer) · 51 open roles · median 28 d
- Cerebras · 40 open roles · median 74 d
- Graphcore · 38 open roles · median 101 d
- Intel Corporation · 33 open roles · median 21 d
How we counted: 912 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 86 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 9 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.