Sr. Software Engineer - AI Triton Kernels - CA, San Jose, United States
Originally posted 7 August 2026 by the employer.
Work on Triton, a language and compiler for high-performance GPU kernels, powering major AI frameworks.
About the role
What you'll do
- Design, research, implement, and optimize high-performance matmul, attention, MoE, and fully fused transformer kernels using Triton, targeting large-scale LLM and multimodal workloads.
- Own and productionize critical Triton/Gluon kernels within vLLM and SGL, ensuring correctness, scalability, and peak throughput.
- Partner with compiler engineers to develop and maintain the Triton AMD backend across ROCm and the LLVM AMDGPU stack.
- Drive deep kernel-level optimizations across the AMD memory hierarchy, wavefront execution, vectorization, MFMA utilization, occupancy tuning, and instruction scheduling.
- Perform rigorous profiling and microbenchmarking led optimization on AMD Instinct GPUs using hardware counters and tracing tools; root-cause bottlenecks.
- Debug and resolve performance and correctness issues end-to-end across PyTorch, vLLM/SGL runtimes, Triton IR/MLIR, ROCm runtime, and the LLVM AMDGPU backend.
- Contribute to open-source Triton, LLVM, and ROCm ecosystems.
What you'll need
- Deep expertise in SIMT programming, parallel algorithms, GPU architecture, and performance engineering.
- Comfortable working across the full stack to drive end-to-end model performance, from vLLM/SGL down to ISA-level performance tuning.
- Ability to perform rigorous quantitative analysis to drive measurable improvements.
Nice to have
- Deep experience in GPU kernel development, compiler backends, or performance engineering focused on AI/ML workloads.
- Strong hands-on expertise with Triton, including writing custom matmul, attention, and fused transformer kernels and understanding Triton IR lowering to GPU backends.
- Deep understanding of modern GPU architectures (wavefront execution, memory hierarchy, scheduling, occupancy).
- Meaningful contributions to open-source projects such as Triton, Torch, vLLM, SGLang, IREE, MLIR, LLVM, or ROCm.
Skills: Triton kernels, GPU architecture, AI/ML workloads, ROCm, LLVM
This role has been open 70 days — well above the 58-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · GPU Software Stack
|
Open roles in category
230
|
Median days open
58 d
|
Median salary
$236k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | AMD | All employers we track in this specialty (230 roles · 19 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 50 | 230 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 406 | 6114 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 59 d | 58 d (+1 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $236k |
Skills observed across this category: Triton kernels, GPU architecture, AI/ML workloads, ROCm, LLVM
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 114 open roles · median 56 d
- AMD (this employer) · 50 open roles · median 60 d
- Intel Corporation · 24 open roles · median 9 d
- Qualcomm · 18 open roles · median 122 d
- Arm Holdings · 5 open roles · median 115 d
- d-Matrix · 2 open roles · median 123 d
How we counted: 230 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (GPU Software Stack) roles from 19 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 18 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.