Member of Technical Staff, Performance Optimization

About Us:

Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI.

The Role:

We're looking for a Software Engineer focused on Performance Optimization to help push the boundaries of speed and efficiency across our AI infrastructure. In this role, you'll take ownership of optimizing performance at every layer of the stack—from low-level GPU kernels to large-scale distributed systems. A key focus will be maximizing the performance of our most demanding workloads, including large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs), and next-generation video models.

You’ll work closely with teams across research, infrastructure, and systems to identify performance bottlenecks, implement cutting-edge optimizations, and scale our AI systems to meet the demands of real-world production use cases. Your work will directly impact the speed, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of some of the most advanced generative AI models in the world.

Key Responsibilities:

Optimize system and GPU performance for high-throughput AI workloads across training and inference

Analyze and improve latency, throughput, memory usage, and compute efficiency

Profile system performance to detect and resolve GPU- and kernel-level bottlenecks

Implement low-level optimizations using CUDA, Triton, and other performance tooling

Drive improvements in execution speed and resource utilization for large-scale model workloads (LLMs, VLMs, and video models)

Collaborate with ML researchers to co-design and tune model architectures for hardware efficiency

Improve support for mixed precision, quantization, and model graph optimization

Build and maintain performance benchmarking and monitoring infrastructure

Scale inference and training systems across multi-GPU, multi-node environments

Evaluate and integrate optimizations for emerging hardware accelerators and specialized runtimes

Minimum Qualifications:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

5+ years of experience working on performance optimization or high-performance computing systems

Proficiency in CUDA or ROCm and experience with GPU profiling tools (e.g., Nsight, nvprof, CUPTI)

Familiarity with PyTorch and performance-critical model execution

Experience with distributed system debugging and optimization in multi-GPU environments

Deep understanding of GPU architecture, parallel programming models, and compute kernels

Preferred Qualifications: