Software Engineer, Performance Optimization

About Us :

At Fireworks, we're building the future of generative AI infrastructure. Our platform delivers the highest-quality models with the fastest and most scalable inference in the industry. We've been independently benchmarked as the leader in LLM inference speed and are driving cutting-edge innovation through projects like our own function calling and multimodal models. Fireworks is a Series C company valued at $4 billion and backed by top investors including Benchmark, Sequoia, Lightspeed, Index, and Evantic. We're an ambitious, collaborative team of builders, founded by veterans of Meta PyTorch and Google Vertex AI.

The Role :

We're looking for a Software Engineer focused on Performance Optimization to help push the boundaries of speed and efficiency across our AI infrastructure. In this role, you'll take ownership of optimizing performance at every layer of the stack-from low-level GPU kernels to large-scale distributed systems. A key focus will be maximizing the performance of our most demanding workloads, including large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs), and next-generation video models.

You'll work closely with teams across research, infrastructure, and systems to identify performance bottlenecks, implement cutting-edge optimizations, and scale our AI systems to meet the demands of real-world production use cases. Your work will directly impact the speed, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of some of the most advanced generative AI models in the world.

Key Responsibilities :

• Optimize system and GPU performance for high-throughput AI workloads across training and inference
• Analyze and improve latency, throughput, memory usage, and compute efficiency
• Profile system performance to detect and resolve GPU- and kernel-level bottlenecks
• Implement low-level optimizations using CUDA, Triton, and other performance tooling
• Drive improvements in execution speed and resource utilization for large-scale model workloads (LLMs, VLMs, and video models)
• Collaborate with ML researchers to co-design and tune model architectures for hardware efficiency
• Improve support for mixed precision, quantization, and model graph optimization
• Build and maintain performance benchmarking and monitoring infrastructure
• Scale inference and training systems across multi-GPU, multi-node environments
• Evaluate and integrate optimizations for emerging hardware accelerators and specialized runtimes

Minimum Qualifications :

Preferred Qualifications :

Example projects :

Total compensation for this role also includes meaningful equity in a fast-growing startup, along with a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package. Base salary is determined by a range of factors including individual qualifications, experience, skills, interview performance, market data, and work location. The listed salary range is intended as a guideline and may be adjusted.

Base Pay Range (Plus Equity)

$175,000-$220,000 USD

Why Fireworks AI?

Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all innovators.