Sovereign AI Application Engineer

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THE ROLE:

We are seeking a Senior Field Application Engineer (FAE) to join the HPC and AI Center of Excellence (CoE) to lead the AI discussion and demonstration within the world’s largest national labs and sovereign AI centers. The role broadly involves;

• Guiding technical AI discussions within large US National labs, US Federal, and Sovereign AI customers at both an application level and a systems level
• ‘Hands-on’ engineering investigations to understand both performance and characteristic performance across popular and customer-specific training and inference workloads.
• Owning the technical interface into the customer, working closely with sales
• Positioning AMD Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs and our new ‘AI smart NICs’

This role is a mixture of strong presales engagement and customer management, coupled with a ‘hand-on’ technical engineering role at both application and system level. While the ability to run AI models and achieve the highest performance (backed by a strong team) is important, the capability to position within your accounts, the ability to guide and influence the customer, coordinate resources within AMD and strong and appropriate communication are also key to success in this role. We are also interested in discussing the role with individuals who largely have a HPC background (must have GPU experience) but are interested in a career move to AI with a determination for a steep on-ramp.

This is a very exciting time within the industry, particularly in the sovereign AI space where nations and entire regional geographies are announcing truly significant budgets for their national programs. As such the role will provide the successful candidate exposure to some of the largest programs globally to grow the AMD business, and visibility through to the executive team within AMD.

The role is based within the United States. While initially focused on the USA it is anticipated there will be opportunity to engage on European and Asian Sovereign AI programs also. As such the role will require some travel to customers and conferences.

THE PERSON:

Does this sound like you? We’d love to talk!

• Demonstrable hands-on expertise working with either popular AI frameworks and models or HPC applications on GPU
• Experience leading large technical programs or opportunities
• Strong systems background. Understands and can quantify the impact of system architecture on performance
• Strong positive can-do attitude willing to do what is necessary and lead others in the wider FAE team by example. Available to help colleagues.
• Skilled in independently prioritizing opportunities to deliver results on time
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Based in the USA
• Open to travel both domestic and international, approximately 10-20% over a year. Anticipate a ramp period with increased travel at the start

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Support winning new AI business in national AI and HPC centers. Enabling customers to execute their AI workloads on AMD Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs, and AI NICs. Supporting partners in RFP responses by testing requested workloads.
• Demonstrate and advise customers and partners through Proof of Concepts, presentations, and training
• Engineering: execute popular and customer-driven AI inference and training workloads, generate results and create a characteristic understanding of AI performance on AMD hardware. Understand how system and software choices affect performance. Compare performance to our competition.
• Run training and inference performance investigations using common frameworks (Pytorch, Tensorflow, JAX) and using MLperf, Hugging Face etc
• Build a body of documentation for internal and external dissemination: AMD-internal guides, whitepapers, tuning guides, training collateral
• Proactive engagement across AMD teams: GPU Business Unit, Engineering, Architecture, Platform, Software, and Product Development teams providing feedback and leadership from the field on requirements. Gathering missing functionality and working with Engineering to resolve and test
• Assist in creating Total Cost of Ownership models to aid pricing with bid desk
• Technically owning and resolving customer and partner issues. Submitting JIRA tickets and driving resolution

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE:

• Demonstrated experience with training and inference workloads or conventional HPC applications on GPUs
• Presales exposure leading the technical discussion and positioning within accounts. Total Cost of Ownership analysis versus competitor
• Executing applications in common frameworks (Pytorch, Tensorflow, Jax).
• Proven understanding of baseline testing of popular AI applications (e.g. Resnet, BERT, DLRM, etc) and other real-world codes such as Large Language Models, image detection, NLP, recommendation engines etc.
• Understanding system level hardware design and its impact on performance
• Understand how the software stack affects performance: frameworks, precision, compilers, libraries, and other accompanying middleware applications
• Customer-facing experience. Able to write technical documents and communicate at an appropriate level depending on the audience
• Some Linux administration; understanding setup for HPC/AI middleware.

Nice to Haves:

• Hands-on AI experience within the National Labs or large federal programs
• Programming experience with any of HIP, CUDA, Python, C/C , Fortran, OpenACC, OpenMP, pSTL
• Understanding impact of inter-node network choices on performance at scale. Creating performance projections for applications
• Deep Neural Networks and their design for different Machine Learning cases.
• Any experience understanding/inspecting/writing assembly
• Understanding of memory and cache hierarchy and methods to query performance/latency at each level. Inspecting and dataflow down to the register-level
• Government level security clearance

ACADEMIC CREDENTIALS:

Bachelors' Degree in a technical field (Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Mathematics) preferred

LOCATION:

Eastern or Central United States (must be in ET or CT time zone)

#LI-RF1

Benefits offered are described:  AMD benefits at a glance.

AMD does not accept unsolicited resumes from headhunters, recruitment agencies, or fee-based recruitment services. AMD and its subsidiaries are equal opportunity, inclusive employers and will consider all applicants without regard to age, ancestry, color, marital status, medical condition, mental or physical disability, national origin, race, religion, political and/or third-party affiliation, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.   We encourage applications from all qualified candidates and will accommodate applicants’ needs under the respective laws throughout all stages of the recruitment and selection process.