> Markdown version of [/jobs/ext/1454129-applied-ai-engineer-kernel-performance](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/jobs/ext/1454129-applied-ai-engineer-kernel-performance). Every page supports `.md` or `Accept: text/markdown`. Links point to the HTML versions so they work for humans too. Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Applied AI Engineer, Kernel Performance - **Company:** Etched, LLC - **Location:** San Jose, CA, United States - **Salary:** $150,000.0 - $225,000.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Extract Transform Load (ETL), Software Debugging, Python (Programming Language), Performance Tuning, Large Language Models, Multi-Agent Systems, Parallel Computation - **Published:** July 26, 2026 - **Apply:** https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=c98b88212c7699c9 ## About the Role * A track record of solving hard problems across stacks and domains - you enjoy being dropped into unfamiliar territory and figuring it out * Comfort with both Python and low-level code: you can read it, modify it, debug it, and direct AI to write it well. We do not care whether you write code from scratch - we care whether you ship things that work. * Kernel experience: you've written or tuned kernels and can explain the mechanisms and performance impact of optimizations you've shipped * Fluency using AI to learn and ramp on new problems - agentic coding tools, deep research, and frontier models are how you work, not an add-on * Moving fluidly between research exploration, agentic experimentation, low-level debugging, and production execution. Strong candidates may also have experience with * First principles thinking on accelerator performance: memory hierarchy, data movement, parallelism, synchronization, and low-precision computation. * Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-based agents or AI tooling that real users depend on in production environments (beyond calling an API - context engineering, tool integration, orchestration, failure analysis) * An eval-driven mindset: you measure whether AI systems work before scaling them * Fine-tuning or post-training, RAG over proprietary data, and/or multi-agent orchestration * High agency and comfort with ambiguity - you find the real problem to solve ## Description Every model release presents a new opportunity to push the frontier on kernel engineering. Future performance breakthroughs will come from AI systems that can understand model architectures and hardware, run thousands of experiments, learn from compiler and profiler feedback, and discover the most performant implementations faster than the best engineers. You will build that system. Your mandate is to build AI systems that autonomously turn newly released model architectures into correct, production-ready implementations optimized for Etched hardware. These systems should explore broader design spaces, learn from every experiment, and reach peak performance faster than any traditional kernel-development workflows. Etched offers a uniquely tight research loop: proprietary hardware, compiler, runtime, kernels, production workloads, and dedicated in-office compute under one roof. You will teach models using proprietary performance signals, iterate on their proposals, and make every experiment improve both the performance optimization system and the hardware it runs on., * Own the system that turns new model architectures into verified, production-ready kernels and model mappings. * Build agents that understand Etched hardware, design experiments, generate implementations, compile and profile them, diagnose bottlenecks, and iterate with our teams, to the limits of model autonomy. * Design evals covering correctness, numerical stability, latency and efficiency. * Turn profiler traces, simulation, hardware counters, and expert judgment into structured signals models can learn from. * Curate proprietary datasets and optimization memory from complete trajectories, expert demonstrations, counterexamples, and production outcomes. * Build fast, reproducible experiment infrastructure and observability so experiments remain interpretable, trustworthy, and high-throughput. * Ship model-generated improvements to production and quantify their impact on end-to-end system performance. * Partner deeply with other architecture teams to shape new abstractions and Etched's hardware-software roadmap. * Continuously evaluate new model releases and deploy the best for each stage of the optimization loop. ## Related Videos - [Are We All Prompt Engineers? How AI Changed What It Means to Build Software](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1980-are-we-all-prompt-engineers-how-ai-changed-what-it-means-to-build-software) - [Using AI Without Losing Your Skills](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/2045-using-ai-without-losing-your-skills) - [Designing and Deploying Distributed Multimodal Multi-Agent Systems with Google's AI Stac](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1976-designing-and-deploying-distributed-multimodal-multi-agent-systems-with-google-s-ai-stac) - [Practical performance tuning for Serverless Java on AWS](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/2075-practical-performance-tuning-for-serverless-java-on-aws) - [The AI-Native Engineering Org: What’s Real, What’s Hype, What’s Next](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100004-the-ai-native-engineering-org-what-s-real-what-s-hype-what-s-next) - [Tour de Force: Open-Source LLM Inference Optimization from Simple to Sophisticated](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100099-tour-de-force-open-source-llm-inference-optimization-from-simple-to-sophisticated) ## Related Articles - [How to Become an AI Engineer](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/331-how-to-become-an-ai-engineer) - [Navigating the AI Shift](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/629-navigating-the-ai-shift) - [MLOps And AI Driven Development](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/82-mlops-and-ai-driven-development) - [What is Agentic Programming and Why Should Developers Care?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/625-what-is-agentic-programming-and-why-should-developers-care) - [Graph and AI Trends 2026: Why Is AI Running but Not Yet Delivering?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/680-graph-and-ai-trends-2026-why-is-ai-running-but-not-yet-delivering) - [The Overflow: AI and Agentic Coding](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/721-the-overflow-ai-and-agentic-coding)