Cerebras Systems
Senior Performance Engineer, Inference
Sunnyvale, CA · Senior
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 75 days ago
Machine LearningNLPLLMsComplianceResearchCommunication
About the role
- We are hiring a Senior Performance Engineer to join our Product team.
- You are an expert on state-of-the-art inference performance and will serve as our resident expert on how Cerebras stacks up against alternative inference providers on both price and performance.
- This role sits at the intersection of performance benchmarking from first principles and competitive intelligence.
Responsibilities
- Design standardized benchmark suites for inference workloads (code generation, summarization, multi-turn conversation, agentic tool use) that enable fair, reproducible comparisons.
- Build and continuously update a competitive pricing model covering token-based pricing, throughput-based pricing, and enterprise contract structures across major inference providers.
- Partner with Sales to build deal-specific competitive analyses showing total cost of ownership and performance advantages for enterprise prospects.
- Collaborate with Product and Engineering to identify where competitors are closing gaps or where Cerebras has underappreciated advantages.
Requirements
- Deep practical experience with state-of-the-art open-source inference frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM.
- 5+ years of experience in ML systems, ML research engineering, or high-performance computing.
- Strong understanding of LLM inference economics: tokens, throughput, latency, batch sizes, precision trade-offs, and how these translate to customer cost.
Nice to have
- Strong understanding of transformer model architecture internals such as attention mechanisms ( MHA, MQA, GQA, MLA, DSA, MHA ) and KV-cache management, and how each affects memory and compute profiles.
- Self-directed and resourceful.
- Background in ML research (publications or significant open-source contributions) with a systems or efficiency focus.
- Contributions to open-source inference or kernel optimization projects.
- Excellent communication skills.
Skills
- Five Reasons to Join Cerebras in 2026.
- Cerebras Systems is committed to creating an equal and diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.
- This website or its third-party tools process personal data.
Company info
- Build a breakthrough AI platform beyond the constraints of the GPU.
- Publish and open source their cutting-edge AI research.
- Work on one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.
- Enjoy job stability with startup vitality.
- Our simple, non-corporate work culture that respects individual beliefs.
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This listing is sourced directly from Cerebras Systems's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.