River

River

Member of Technical Staff, Hardware, Compiler Engineer

Palo Alto, CA; Austin, TX · Staff+

H1B sponsorship available$200k-$420kDetected 25 days ago
C++Backend DevelopmentAlgorithmsDeep LearningPyTorchLogisticsElectrical Engineering

About the role

  • You will take ownership of kernel algorithms, intermediate representations, and even modify the ISA as necessary to achieve a flexible and high performance compiler stack.
  • You will be collaborating both up and down the stack with AI researchers and modelers, as well as with performance engineers and silicon architects.

Responsibilities

  • Graph Lowering & Optimization: Design and implement compiler passes to lower PyTorch models into custom hardware, leveraging MLIR dialects and LLVM frameworks.
  • Custom Backend Development: Develop and maintain the backend toolchain for our custom silicon, including instruction scheduling, register allocation, and hardware-specific code generation.
  • Memory & Loop Transformations: Design sophisticated tiling and fusion strategies to maximize bandwidth utilization and minimize on-chip memory movement.
  • Kernel Integration: Collaborate with software and hardware teams to integrate high-performance kernels (Triton/CUDA-like) into the automated compiler flow.
  • Performance Profiling: Identify "compilation gaps" where the compiler fails to achieve peak hardware performance, and collaborate with the performance team for targeted optimizations to close those gaps.
  • HW/SW Co-Design: Partner with the RTL and Architecture teams to change the custom ISA definitions.
  • A highly collaborative mindset to push boundaries and co-design effectively with other engineers.

Requirements

  • Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering, and 5+ years practical industry experience working with advanced process nodes (7nm or below).
  • Proficiency in modern C/C++ for building robust, scalable, and high-performance compiler infrastructure.

Nice to have

  • (We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet all of these)
  • Hands-on experience in post-Silicon firmware and model update patches
  • Experience defining and implementing custom dialects, lowering passes, and graph rewrites in an LLVM-based ecosystem.
  • Knowledge of the tradeoffs between static and runtime environments, including JITs and ABIs
  • Visa Sponsorship: We sponsor visas.
  • We can't guarantee success for every candidate or role, but if you're the right fit, we're committed to working through the visa process.

Skills

  • Skills and Qualifications

Compensation

  • Depending on background, skills, and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $200,000 - $420,000 USD.

Benefits

  • River AI offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, and relocation support as needed.
  • Deep hands-on experience with MLIR or XLA for deep learning workloads.

Company info

  • We are scientists, engineers, and builders from the industry's top tech companies and AI labs.
  • We bring a proven track record of scaling consumer systems for hundreds of millions of users and architecting the pre-training infrastructure behind today's frontier models.
  • At River, our mission is to create personal AI owned and shaped by each individual.
  • personal hardware for local inference, custom training infrastructure, next-generation UIs, and frontier deep learning research.

Visa & Work Authorization

  • We can't guarantee success for every candidate or role, but if you're the right fit, we're committed to working through the visa process.
  • We sponsor visas.

This listing is sourced directly from River's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.