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# Staff AI Performance Engineer

- **Company:** Graphcore Limited
- **Location:** Milpitas, CA, United States
- **Contract:** Temporary to permanent
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Systems Engineering, Big Data, C++ (Programming Language), Profiling, Data Centers, Distributed Systems, Python (Programming Language), Machine Learning, Performance Tuning, Tensorflow, AI Infrastructure, High Performance Computing
- **Published:** October 8, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=a2a4634f6698a9ba

## About the Role

* Strong experience profiling and optimizing AI, machine learning or high-performance computing workloads.
 * Experience with distributed systems and communication libraries such as MPI, NCCL, UCX or libfabric.
 * Strong C++ and Python skills, including reliable tools or performance-sensitive software.
 * Deep understanding of compute, memory and communication behavior in large-scale systems.
 * Ability to lead technically complex work and coordinate improvements across teams.
 * Familiarity with MLPerf, accelerated architectures, ML frameworks or high-performance interconnects.

While we have outlined a set of requirements, we value transferable skills and diverse experiences. We also welcome engineers returning to the profession after a career break, including through returnship routes.

## Description

Lead performance work that turns large-scale AI workloads into faster, more efficient systems.

As a Staff AI Performance Engineer, you will analyze and optimize AI training and inference workloads across distributed systems. Your work will connect compute, memory, networking and software behavior.

You will lead complex performance workstreams across hardware and software. You will find bottlenecks, validate improvements and turn performance evidence into practical engineering decisions.

You will build benchmarks, profile demanding workloads and develop C++ and Python tools for analysis and optimization. Your recommendations will help teams improve efficiency, scalability and reliability.

This role gives you broad technical scope across AI infrastructure at data center scale. It is based in Milpitas, California.

The team and culture

The System Engineering Performance team architects, evaluates and optimizes high-performance infrastructure for large-scale data center deployments. The team works across the computing stack to understand real system behavior.

Work moves through evidence, ownership and clear technical judgment. You will lead investigations, coordinate across teams and validate impact with reliable performance data.

Decisions are shaped through benchmarks, models, simulations and practical engineering tradeoffs. The team values engineers who think big, act fast, take responsibility, speak up and lead beyond their own area.