Software Development Engineer 2

This role is with a leading technology company that is at the forefront of innovation, shaping the future of digital experiences. They are dedicated to creating groundbreaking software and hardware that empowers users and pushes the boundaries of what's possible. As a partner with Aquent, you will have the opportunity to contribute to a team that is passionate about performance and delivering exceptional quality in a fast-paced, collaborative environment. Are you ready to make a significant impact on the performance of cutting-edge graphics applications? In this role, you will be instrumental in diagnosing and resolving complex performance issues, directly influencing the fluidity and responsiveness of user experiences. You will dive deep into the intricacies of graphics pipelines, uncovering bottlenecks and driving improvements that enhance the overall quality and efficiency of advanced systems. Your expertise will be critical in ensuring seamless and high-fidelity visual computing, making a tangible difference for users worldwide.

What You'll Do:

• Reproduce reported graphics performance issues from testing data.
• Capture GPU/CPU profiles and traces using industry-standard profiling tools to identify bottlenecks (e.g., GPU-bound vs. CPU-bound, synchronization, shader occupancy, pipelining).
• Analyze traces and performance counters to isolate root causes and propose actionable next steps for resolution.
• Create clear performance write-ups, including reproduction steps, captures, metrics, and concise summaries of suspected hotspots.
• Collaborate with graphics driver and runtime engineers to validate hypotheses, test fixes, and confirm performance improvements and regressions.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a relevant field.
• 2-4 years of experience in software development or performance analysis.
• Strong understanding of real-time rendering fundamentals and the GPU graphics pipeline (draw calls, state changes, shaders, textures, buffers).
• Understanding of GPU architecture basics (waves/warps, occupancy, caches, memory bandwidth) and shader instruction set architecture at a high level.
• Familiarity with modern graphics API concepts (e.g., command queues/lists, descriptor heaps, resource states/barriers) and basic shader concepts in common shader languages.
• Hands-on experience with profiling tools and interpreting timing/counter data.
• Proficiency in C/C++ with the ability to read and reason about performance-sensitive code.
• Comfortable working in various operating environments (command line basics, driver/runtime builds) and strong written communication for bug reports and triage summaries.
• Comfortable working in server environments (shell, services, and basic scripting).
• Scripting for automation (e.g., Python, PowerShell, Bash) and basic data analysis (e.g., spreadsheets, simple plots).
• Exposure to graphics stack concepts and debugging (e.g., display driver models, graphics infrastructure, event tracing, driver symbol debugging).

• Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Hands-on graphics experience beyond generic software engineering.
• Familiarity with a broad range of graphics and performance analysis tooling.
• Hardware architecture knowledge relevant to graphics processing.
• Proven experience identifying performance bottlenecks through trace collection and in-depth analysis.