Sr. ML Kernel Performance Engineer, AWS Neuron, Annapurna Labs

Amazon
Cupertino, California, USA2025-08-14ONSITE

About the job

The Annapurna Labs team at Amazon Web Services (AWS) builds AWS Neuron, the software development kit used to accelerate deep learning and GenAI workloads on Amazon’s custom machine learning accelerators, Inferentia and Trainium. The Acceleration Kernel Library team is at the forefront of maximizing performance for AWS's custom ML accelerators. Working at the hardware-software boundary, our engineers craft high-performance kernels for ML functions, ensuring every FLOP counts in delivering optimal performance for our customers' demanding workloads. We combine deep hardware knowledge with ML expertise to push the boundaries of what's possible in AI acceleration.

Responsibilities

Design and implement high-performance compute kernels for ML operations, leveraging the Neuron architecture and programming models

Analyze and optimize kernel-level performance across multiple generations of Neuron hardware

Conduct detailed performance analysis using profiling tools to identify and resolve bottlenecks

Implement compiler optimizations such as fusion, sharding, tiling, and scheduling

Work directly with customers to enable and optimize their ML models on AWS accelerators

Collaborate across teams to develop innovative kernel optimization techniques

Qualifications

Minimum

5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience

5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience

5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience

5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience

Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team

Preferred

Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

6+ years of full software development experience

Expertise in accelerator architectures for ML or HPC such as GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, or custom architectures

Experience with GPU kernel optimization and GPGPU computing such as CUDA, NKI, Triton, OpenCL, SYCL, or ROCm

Demonstrated experience with NVIDIA PTX and/or AMD GPU ISA

Experience developing high performance libraries for HPC applications

Proficiency in low-level performance optimization for GPUs

Experience with LLVM/MLIR backend development for GPUs

Knowledge of ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) and their GPU backends

Experience with parallel programming and optimization techniques

Understanding of GPU memory hierarchies and optimization strategies