Principal Engineer - Perf and Benchmarking

Core Weave is the essential cloud platform for AI. Built for pioneers by pioneers, Core Weave delivers technology, tools, and teams that enable innovators to build and scale AI with confidence.

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to lead the Benchmarking & Performance team. You will manage a planet‑scale performance data warehouse and help achieve industry‑leading end‑to‑end performance benchmarking publications.

• Strategy & Leadership – Define the multi‑year benchmarking strategy and roadmap; prioritize models/workloads (LLMs, diffusion, vision, speech) and hardware tiers. Build, lead, and mentor a high‑performing team of performance engineers and data analysts. Establish governance for claims: documented methodologies, versioning, reproducibility, and audit trails.
• Perf Ownership – Lead end‑to‑end MLPerf Inference and Training submissions: workload selection, cluster planning, runbooks, audits, and result publication. Coordinate optimization tracks with NVIDIA (CUDA, cuDNN, Tensor
  
  RT/Tensor
  
  RT‑LLM, Triton, NCCL) to hit competitive results; drive upstream fixes where needed.
• Internal Latency & Throughput Benchmarks – Design a Kubernetes‑native, repeatable benchmarking service that exercises Core Weave stacks across SUNK, Kueue, and Kubeflow pipelines. Measure and report latency, jitter, tokens/s, time‑to‑first‑token, cold‑start/warm‑start, and cost‑per‑token across models, precis ions, batch sizes, and GPU types. Maintain a corpus of representative scenarios and data sets; automate comparisons across software releases and hardware generations.
• Tooling & Automation – Build CI/CD pipelines and K8s controllers/operators to schedule benchmarks at scale; integrate with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Open Telemetry) and results warehouses. Implement supply‑chain integrity for benchmark artifacts (SBOMs, Cosign signatures).
• Cross‑functional & Community – Partner with NVIDIA, key ISVs, and OSS projects to co‑develop optimizations and upstream improvements. Support Sales/SEs with authoritative numbers for RFPs and competitive evaluations; brief analysts and press with rigorous, defensible data.

• 10+ years building distributed systems or HPC/cloud services, with deep expertise on large‑scale ML training or similar high‑performance workloads.
• Proven track record of architecting or building planet‑scale data systems (e.g., telemetry platforms, observability stacks, cloud data warehouses, large‑scale OLAP engines).
• Deep understanding of GPU performance (CUDA, NCCL, RDMA, NVLink/PCIe, memory bandwidth), model‑server stacks (Triton, vLLM, Tensor
  
  RT‑LLM, Torch Serve), and distributed training frameworks (PyTorch FSDP/Deep Speed/Megatron‑LM).
• Proficient with Kubernetes and ML control planes; familiarity with SUNK, Kueue, and Kubeflow in production environments.
• Excellent communicator able to interface with executives, customers, auditors, and OSS communities.

• Experience with time‑series databases, log‑structured merge trees (LSM), or custom storage engine development.
• Experience running MLPerf submissions or equivalent audited benchmarks at scale.
• Contributions to MLPerf, Triton, vLLM, PyTorch, KServe, or similar OSS projects.
• Experience benchmarking multi‑region fleets and large clusters (thousands of GPUs).
• Publications/talks on ML performance, latency engineering, or large‑scale benchmarking methodology.

Base salary range: $206,000 – $333,000. The starting salary will be determined based on job‑related knowledge, skills, experience, and market location. In addition to base salary, compensation includes a discretionary bonus, equity awards, and a comprehensive benefits program.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance – 100% paid by Core Weave
• Company‑paid Life Insurance
• Voluntary supplemental life insurance
• Short and long‑term disability insurance
• Flexible Spending Account
• Health Savings Account
• Tuition Reimbursement
• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
• Mental Wellness Benefits through Spring Health
• Family‑forming support provided by Carrot
• Paid Parental Leave
• Flexible, full‑service childcare support with Kinside
• 401(k) with a generous…