Staff AI Performance Engineer - Milpitas, California, United States
Originally posted 9 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role involves leading performance work to transform large-scale AI workloads into faster, more efficient systems.
What you'll do
- Lead performance work across hardware and software to optimize AI training and inference workloads.
- Analyze and optimize AI training and inference workloads across distributed systems.
- Build benchmarks, profile demanding workloads, and develop C++ and Python tools for analysis and optimization.
- Identify bottlenecks, validate improvements, and translate performance evidence into engineering decisions.
- Coordinate complex performance workstreams and improvements across teams.
What you'll need
- Strong experience profiling and optimizing AI, machine learning or high-performance computing workloads.
- Experience with distributed systems and communication libraries such as MPI, NCCL, UCX or libfabric.
- Strong C++ and Python skills, including reliable tools or performance-sensitive software.
- Deep understanding of compute, memory and communication behavior in large-scale systems.
- Ability to lead technically complex work and coordinate improvements across teams.
Skills: AI workloads, distributed systems, performance optimization, C++, Python, data center
This role has been open 0 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 | Graphcore | All employers we track in this specialty (912 roles · 86 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 44 | 912 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 91 | 6078 · 146 employers |
| Median days open | 85 d | 51 d (+34 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $229k |
Skills observed across this category: AI workloads, distributed systems, performance optimization, C++, Python, data center
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 250 open roles · median 49 d
- Qualcomm · 60 open roles · median 61 d
- AMD · 51 open roles · median 28 d
- Cerebras · 40 open roles · median 74 d
- Graphcore (this employer) · 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.