AI Performance Engineer

About Modular At Modular, a Qualcomm company , we’re on a mission to revolutionize AI infrastructure by systematically rebuilding the AI software stack from the ground up. Our team, made up of industry leaders and experts, is building cutting-edge, modular infrastructure that simplifies AI development and deployment. By rethinking the complexities of AI systems, we’re empowering everyone to unlock AI’s full potential and tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges. If you’re passionate about shaping the future of AI and creating tools that make a real difference in people’s lives, we want you on our team. You can read about our culture and careers to understand how we work and what we value. About the role: We are looking for an AI Performance Engineer to join the ASIC Performance team. You will design, implement, and tune high-performance attention kernels—and a broader set of foundational AI kernels—for new accelerator architectures. Attention is evolving quickly across models and hardware: grouped-query and multi-head attention, prefill and decode, paged KV caches, sliding-window and global attention, and new sparse or fused variants each create different compute, memory, and data-movement tradeoffs. In this role, you will translate those algorithmic requirements into production-quality implementations that exploit the unique capabilities of GPUs, NPUs, ASICs, and other emerging accelerators. You will also contribute to the architecture and development of Modular’s Attention framework, building reusable abstractions that let model and kernel developers express attention variants cleanly while supporting hardware-specific specialization and excellent end-to-end performance. This is a senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who can independently own ambiguous performance problems, collaborate across organizational boundaries, and turn research ideas and hardware capabilities into robust product technology. Our goal is to deliver performant tokens to end cloud users with production-ready workloads, not just microbenchmarks. LOCATION: Candidates based in the US, Canada, and UK are welcome to apply. You can work in our office in Los Altos, CA, or Edinburgh, or remotely from home. Onboarding for new hires is conducted in-person at the appropriate office. What you will do: Design and implement high-performance attention kernels for prefill and decode, including variants such as MHA, GQA, paged attention, sliding-window/global attention, and fused FlashAttention-style algorithms. Build and optimize general AI kernels—including matrix multiplication, softmax, normalization, activation, embedding, reduction, and data-movement primitives—needed to bring up modern models on new accelerators. Contribute to the design and implementation of the Attention framework, with reusable interfaces that balance portability, composability, tunability, and hardware-specific optimization. Profile workloads, identify…