FriendliAI · 4 days ago
Software Engineer - GPU Kernel
San Mateo, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Mid Level
$160K/yr - $230K/yr
3+ years expFriendliAI is a San Mateo, CA-based startup building the next-generation AI inference platform that accelerates the deployment of large language and multimodal models. They are seeking a GPU Kernel Engineer to design and optimize GPU kernels for their AI inference platform, ensuring high performance and efficiency.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)Generative AIInformation TechnologyInternetSaaSSoftware
Hiring Manager
Woojin Lee
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
Qualification
Required
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 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
Competitive compensation.
Premium hardware and health support benefits.
Health insurance
Startup equity
Other benefits
Company
FriendliAI
FriendliAI is an AI infrastructure company that enables deployment, scaling, and monitoring of large language and multimodal models.
11-50 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageTotal Funding
$26.75MKey Investors
Capstone Partners
2025-08-28Seed· $20M
2021-12-15Seed· $6.75M
Leadership Team
Byung-Gon Chun
Chief Executive Officer
Gyeong-In Yu
Chief Technology Officer
Recent News
Inside HPC & AI News | High-Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligence
2025-12-20
2025-12-16
2025-10-28
Company data provided by crunchbase