Senior / Staff ML Compiler Engineer

Location: San Jose or Irvine, CA | Full-Time

About Our Client

Our client is a fast-growing fabless semiconductor company building next-generation, energy-efficient domain-specific processors designed for edge AI, wireless communications, advanced radar, computer vision, and autonomous systems.

Founded by industry veterans, our client is developing breakthrough System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures leveraging RISC-V and advanced compute technologies to deliver real-time intelligence at the sensor edge.

This is an opportunity to join a highly innovative engineering team working at the intersection of semiconductor architecture, AI acceleration, and compiler technology.

Position Summary

We are seeking a Senior / Staff ML Compiler Engineer to develop and optimize compiler technologies that unlock the performance of next-generation custom silicon.

This is not a traditional application software engineering role.

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in compiler backend development, code generation, runtime optimization, hardware/software co-design, and performance tuning for compute-intensive architectures.

This individual will work closely with architecture, silicon, systems, and AI teams to ensure software fully enables our client’s processor roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

Compiler Architecture & Development

• Design, develop, and optimize compiler infrastructure for custom processor and accelerator architectures
• Build compiler backends, optimization passes, code generation workflows, and execution pipelines
• Improve instruction scheduling, register allocation, memory access efficiency, and execution performance
• Develop graph-level and operator-level optimization strategies for AI workloads
• Support compiler enablement for emerging compute architectures

Runtime & Performance Optimization

• Develop runtime systems and execution frameworks for optimized inference and compute performance
• Profile workloads and identify bottlenecks impacting latency, throughput, memory bandwidth, and power efficiency
• Debug performance issues across simulation, emulation, and silicon environments
• Build internal benchmarking and performance analysis tools

Hardware / Software Co-Design

• Partner with architecture and hardware teams on next-generation processor development
• Analyze workload behavior to influence architecture decisions
• Help drive tradeoff analysis involving performance, memory efficiency, latency, and power consumption
• Collaborate with silicon teams during bring-up and optimization cycles

AI / ML Workload Enablement

• Optimize execution of machine learning and inference workloads on custom accelerators
• Support deployment of workloads involving:
• computer vision
• edge AI
• radar
• sensing
• autonomous systems
• signal processing
• Collaborate with AI software teams on model optimization and framework integration

Required Qualifications

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related discipline
• 7+ years of relevant experience (Senior level)
• 10+ years of relevant experience (Staff level)
• Strong C/C++ programming expertise
• Deep experience with compiler development and optimization
• Hands-on expertise with one or more of:
• LLVM
• MLIR
• TVM
• XLA
• GCC
• custom compiler frameworks
• Experience in:
• compiler backend development
• code generation
• optimization passes
• runtime systems
• performance profiling
• Strong understanding of:
• computer architecture
• memory systems
• instruction scheduling
• register allocation
• parallel execution
• low-level performance optimization

Preferred Qualifications

• Semiconductor industry experience
• Experience with AI accelerators, NPUs, DSPs, GPUs, or custom compute architectures
• Knowledge of RISC-V architectures
• Experience with:
• graph optimization
• quantization
• inference optimization
• edge AI deployment
• embedded systems
• HW/SW co-design
• Familiarity with autonomous systems, radar, signal processing, or computer vision workloads