Performance Modeling Engineer

Sr/Principal Software Engineer – Simulator Developer

Location: Santa Clara, CA | Onsite

A VC-backed, stealth-mode startup is building rack-level AI inference systems. The company’s differentiated SoC enables system-level innovations designed to maximize efficiency for data center-scale inference serving. The team is seeking highly skilled and motivated engineers to help build hardware and develop or extend open-source software to serve leading-edge models with extreme efficiency.

What You'll Do:

Lead or contribute as a member of a small team, depending on experience, developing performance and/or functional models that guide architecture decisions and accelerate hardware-software co-design in a fast-moving startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain processor simulators, including performance and/or functional models
• Model microarchitectural components such as pipelines, memory hierarchy, interconnects, and accelerators
• Generate and curate traces to support targeted performance analysis goals
• Analyze simulation results to inform architecture tradeoffs and optimizations
• Collaborate closely with architecture, hardware, and compiler teams
• Own critical simulation infrastructure from concept through production use

Experience

• 5 years of software engineering experience, ideally in systems, architecture, or EDA domains
• Strong C/C and Python skills with experience in large, complex codebases
• Experience with processor simulators, architectural modeling, or performance analysis, especially from-scratch simulator development
• Solid understanding of computer architecture and microarchitecture
• Ability to work independently and make technical decisions in an early-stage startup environment

Nice to Have

• Experience with AI/ML accelerators, GPUs, or heterogeneous systems
• Familiarity with simulators such as gem5, gem5-SALAM, or proprietary modeling tools
• Background in hardware-software co-design or compilers