Principal/senior GPU Software Performance Engineer — Training At Scale

Principal / Senior GPU Software Performance Engineer — Training at Scale

What you do at AMD changes everything. At AMD, our mission is to build great products that accelerate next-generation computing experiences—from AI and data centers, to PCs, gaming and embedded systems. Grounded in a culture of innovation and collaboration, we believe real progress comes from bold ideas, human ingenuity and a shared passion to create something extraordinary. When you join AMD, you'll discover the real differentiator is our culture. We push the limits of innovation to solve the world's most important challenges—striving for execution excellence, while being direct, humble, collaborative, and inclusive of diverse perspectives. Join us as we shape the future of AI and beyond. Together, we advance your career.

The Role:

We train large models across multi-GPU clusters. Your charter is to make training materially faster and cheaper by leading kernel-level performance engineering—from math kernels and fused epilogues to cluster-level throughput—partnering with researchers, framework teams, and infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own kernel performance: Design, implement, and land high-impact HIP/C++ kernels (e.g., attention, layernorm, softmax, GEMM/epilogues, fused pointwise) that are wave-size portable and optimized for LDS, caches, and MFMA units.
• Lead profiling & tuning: Build repeatable workflows with timelines, hardware counters, and roofline analysis; remove memory bottlenecks; tune launch geometry/occupancy; validate speedups with A/B harnesses.
• Drive fusion & algorithmic improvements: Identify profitable fusions, tiling strategies, vectorized I/O, shared-memory/scratchpad layouts, asynchronous pipelines, and warp/wave-level collectives—while maintaining numerical stability.
• Influence frameworks & libraries: Upstream or extend performance-critical ops in PyTorch/JAX/XLA/Triton; evaluate and integrate vendor math libraries; guide compiler/codegen choices for target architectures.
• Scale beyond one GPU: Optimize P2P and collective comms, overlap compute/comm, and improve data/pipeline/tensor parallelism throughput across nodes.
• Benchmarking & SLOs: Define and own KPIs (throughput, time-to-train, $/step, energy/step); maintain dashboards, perf CI gates, and regression triage.
• Technical leadership: Mentor senior engineers, set coding/perf standards, lead performance "war rooms," and partner with silicon/vendor teams on microarchitecture-aware optimizations.
• Quality & reliability: Build reproducible perf harnesses, deterministic test modes, and documentation/playbooks so improvements persist release-over-release.

Preferred Experience:

Experience in systems/HPC/ML performance engineering, with hands-on GPU kernel work and shipped optimizations in production training or HPC. Expert in modern C++ (C++17+) and at least one GPU programming model (CUDA, HIP, or SYCL/oneAPI) or a GPU kernel DSL (e.g., Triton); comfortable with templates, memory qualifiers, atomics, and warp/wave-level collectives. Deep understanding of GPU microarchitecture: SIMT execution, occupancy vs. register/scratchpad pressure, memory hierarchy (global/L2/shared or LDS), coalescing, bank conflicts, vectorization, and instruction-level parallelism. Proficiency with profiling & analysis: timelines and counters (e.g., Nsight Systems/Compute, rocprof/Omniperf, VTune/GPA or equivalents), ISA/disassembly inspection, and correlating metrics to code changes. Proven track record reducing time-to-train or $-per-step via kernel and collective-comms optimizations on multi-GPU clusters. Strong Linux fundamentals (perf/eBPF, NUMA, PCIe/links), build systems (CMake/Bazel), Python, and containerized dev (Docker/Podman). Experience with distributed training (PyTorch DDP/FSDP/ZeRO/DeepSpeed or JAX) and GPU collectives. Expertise in mixed precision (BF16/FP16/FP8), numerics, and stability/accuracy validation at kernel boundaries. Background in compiler/IR (LLVM/MLIR) or codegen for GPU backends; ability to guide optimization passes with performance goals. Hands-on with cluster orchestration (Slurm/Kubernetes), IB/RDMA tuning, and compute/communication overlap strategies.

Academic Credentials:

Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent.

Location:

San Jose, CA