LLM​/VLM Inference Optimization Research Engineer

Location:

San Jose

Team:

Technology

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A02632A

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Responsibilities

The Seed Infrastructures team oversees the distributed training, reinforcement learning framework, high-performance inference, and heterogeneous hardware compilation technologies for AI foundation models.

Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and optimize core training kernels for large-scale foundation models, including Attention, GEMM, and MoE operators, with a focus on both forward and backward passes.

- Analyze hardware performance bottlenecks through micro-benchmarking, profiling, and performance modeling, and translate findings into kernel-level optimizations.

- Implement low-precision computation paths and ensure numerical correctness and training stability.

- Collaborate with team members to bring up and optimize training kernels on new hardware architectures and integrate them into production training frameworks.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

- Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.

- Strong proficiency in C/C++ and Python; solid foundations in computer architecture and parallel programming.

- Hands-on experience implementing and optimizing high-performance GPU kernels (e.g., Attention, GEMM, MoE) using at least one low-level programming stack such as CUDA / CUTLASS, Triton, or HIP.

- Ability to identify compute, memory, and communication bottlenecks and explain optimization decisions with measured data.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience optimizing kernels for training workloads, including backward passes and integration with training frameworks such as Megatron.

- Experience with low-precision kernel implementation and numerical accuracy validation.

- Experience porting and optimizing kernels across different hardware generations or accelerator architectures.

- Familiarity with Triton compiler internals or ML compiler backends.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $254400 - $480000 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. Exercising sound judgment.

About Doubao (Seed)

Established in 2023, the Byte Dance Seed team is dedicated to pioneering new paths toward artificial general intelligence. We aspire to advance the frontier of intelligence to drive progress for both technology and society.

With a long-term vision for the AI sector, the Seed team's research spans MLLM, Gen Media, AI for Science, and Robotics. We maintain a global presence with laboratories and career opportunities across China, Singapore, and the United States. To date, we have launched industry-leading general foundation models and cutting-edge multimodal capabilities. Our…