Software Engineer – GPU Kernel

About the job

FriendliAI is looking for a GPU Kernel Engineer to design, build, and optimize the low-level compute kernels that power our large-scale, GPU-accelerated AI inference platform. You will be delivering world-class inference speed across NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. With our recent $20M funding, we are scaling our team to meet market demand.

This is a deeply technical, high-impact role where you will write GPU code, implement advanced optimizations. As part of our engine team, you will contribute directly to the company’s proprietary inference engine which supports over 600,000 models on Hugging Face. You will work with the inventors of continuous batching and collaborate with the platform team to deploy your work into production.

Key Responsibilities

Design, implement, and optimize high-performance GPU kernels for AI inference (e.g., GEMM, attention, routing)

Develop and maintain GPU code in CUDA and C++, including low-level assembly when needed

Implement reduced-precision and quantized kernels (FP8/FP4) for low-latency or high-throughput inference

Benchmark and ensure cross-vendor performance parity between NVIDIA and AMD hardware

Contribute to internal GPU libraries and tune performance of performance-critical components

Accelerate multi-modal model pipelines

Investigate and integrate next-generation GPU features

Qualifications

3+ years of experience in GPU programming, HPC, or performance-critical systems

Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field

Strong proficiency in CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs or ROCm/HIP for AMD GPUs

Deep understanding of GPU architecture: warps, threads, memory hierarchy, synchronization, and latency-throughput trade-offs

Proficiency in C++

Experience with GPU profiling and performance tuning

Strong numerical background with understanding of precision trade-offs and quantization techniques

Preferred Experience

Experience optimizing transformer, multi-modal, or Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures at the kernel level

Familiarity with the latest GPU libraries and frameworks (CUTLASS, Triton, …)

Inter-GPU communication programming experience

Open-source contributions related to GPU performance or ML acceleration

Research or conference presentations on GPU optimization, HPC, or numerical computing

Benefits

Flexible working hours

Daily lunch and dinner provided; unlimited snacks and beverages

Supportive and highly collaborative work environment

Health check-up support and top-tier equipment/hardware support

A front-row seat to the generative AI infrastructure revolution

Competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits.

About FriendliAI

FriendliAI is building the world’s best AI inference platform that makes large language and multi-modal models fast, efficient, and deployable at scale. We power high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide and integrate directly with Hugging Face, giving developers instant access to over 600,000 open-source models.

We are a small, fast-moving team doing work that matters at one of the most exciting moments in the history of technology. With our world-class inference engine, we are building a platform that the AI industry can actually rely on.