About the job
We are hiring a Senior Performance Engineer to join our Product team. You are an expert on state-of-the-art inference performance and will serve as our resident expert on how Cerebras stacks up against alternative inference providers on both price and performance. This role sits at the intersection of performance benchmarking from first principles and competitive intelligence. The role has two core pillars: Performance Benchmarking and Competitive Pricing Intelligence.
Responsibilities
Design standardized benchmark suites for inference workloads (code generation, summarization, multi-turn conversation, agentic tool use) that enable fair, reproducible comparisons.
Stay current with GPU optimization communities (CUDA, Triton, TensorRT) and evaluate how new kernel fusions, flash-attention variants, and quantization techniques shift performance ceilings.
Build and continuously update a competitive pricing model covering token-based pricing, throughput-based pricing, and enterprise contract structures across major inference providers.
Monitor industry announcements, pricing changes, and new product launches. Synthesize findings into actionable briefs for the Sales and Product teams.
Partner with Sales to build deal-specific competitive analyses showing total cost of ownership and performance advantages for enterprise prospects.
Collaborate with Product and Engineering to identify where competitors are closing gaps or where Cerebras has underappreciated advantages.
Track third-party benchmarking sources (Artificial Analysis, InferenceX) and ensure Cerebras is well-represented and accurately measured.
Qualifications
Minimum
Deep practical experience with state-of-the-art open-source inference frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM.
5+ years of experience in ML systems, ML research engineering, or high-performance computing.
Strong understanding of LLM inference economics: tokens, throughput, latency, batch sizes, precision trade-offs, and how these translate to customer cost.
Strong understanding of transformer model architecture internals such as attention mechanisms (MHA, MQA, GQA, MLA, DSA, MHA) and KV-cache management, and how each affects memory and compute profiles.
Self-directed and resourceful.
Preferred
Background in ML research (publications or significant open-source contributions) with a systems or efficiency focus.
Contributions to open-source inference or kernel optimization projects.
Excellent communication skills. You will collaborate with executives, write for engineers, and create materials for sales leaders.