Systems Performance Modeling Engineer - Sunnyvale, CA, United States

Originally posted 23 September 2026 by the employer.

About the role

This role involves building models and tools to predict how generative AI inference workloads perform on Tensordyne systems, from a single accelerator up through rack, pod, and cluster scale. The position focuses on hands-on engineering, including writing simulator code, running experiments, and debugging performance predictions against real hardware.

What you'll do

• Implement and extend simulation-based performance models for multimodal generative AI inference at rack, pod, and cluster scale, covering compute, memory, collective communication, and network fabric.
• Model how serving strategies (tensor, pipeline, and expert parallelism, prefill/decode disaggregation, batching, and KV-cache placement) interact with Tensordyne silicon and fabric topology, and measure the effect on latency, throughput, and cost per token.
• Build trace-capture and replay tooling that records real execution from our inference runtime and replays it under hypothetical silicon, system, and network configurations.
• Model collective communication on multi-hop scale-out fabrics, including implementing custom collective algorithms designed for our topology.
• Run calibration experiments on Tensordyne hardware as systems come up, compare them against model predictions, and fix the sources of error.
• Run design-space sweeps and write up clear analyses that architects and engineering teams use in ASIC, fabric, and system configuration decisions.

What you'll need

• Hands-on experience building performance models, simulators, or analytical tools for ML workloads, distributed systems, or computer architecture.
• Solid understanding of distributed ML execution, including parallelism strategies, collective communication (All-Reduce, All-Gather, All-to-All, etc.), and how they scale.
• Working knowledge of system architecture across compute, memory, interconnect, and networking, and the ability to reason about bottlenecks between them.
• Experience comparing model predictions against real measurements, and debugging where they diverge.
• Strong programming skills in C++ and Python, with clean, testable, maintainable code.
• MS or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with LLM inference serving: batching, KV-cache management, disaggregated prefill/decode, and latency/throughput trade-offs.
• Experience modeling or benchmarking collective communication libraries (NCCL, RCCL, or similar) on real clusters.
• Background in data center or HPC networking: topologies, RDMA/RoCE, and congestion behavior.
• Experience profiling ML workloads on accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, or custom ASICs).
• Exposure to hardware/software co-design or early-stage architecture evaluation.
• Publications or open-source contributions in ML systems, architecture, or networking.

Skills: generative AI inference, performance modeling, ML workloads, distributed ML execution, system architecture, C++