Demo

Kernel Engineer

Magic
San Francisco, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 12/27/2025
AVAILABLE BEFORE 2/19/2026
Magic’s mission is to build safe AGI that accelerates humanity’s progress on the world’s most important problems. We believe the most promising path to safe AGI lies in automating research and code generation to improve models and solve alignment more reliably than humans can alone. Our approach combines frontier-scale pre-training, domain-specific RL, ultra-long context, and inference-time compute to achieve this goal.

About the role:

As a Kernel Engineer, you will design, implement and maintain high-performance kernels to optimize throughput and latency during training and inference.

What you might work on:

  • Design, develop and optimize custom high-performance GPU kernels
  • Evaluate porting Magic’ compute kernels to alternative hardware options
  • Think beyond the kernel level to the broader scheme of how we train and inference our models and suggest improvements

What we’re looking for:

  • Experience with low-level programming of AI accelerators (e.g. CUDA, XLA)
  • Deep understanding of GPU, TPU, and/or CPU architecture

Magic strives to be the place where high-potential individuals can do their best work. We value quick learning and grit just as much as skill and experience.

Our culture:

  • Integrity. Words and actions should be aligned
  • Hands-on. At Magic, everyone is building
  • Teamwork. We move as one team, not N individuals
  • Focus. Safely deploy AGI. Everything else is noise
  • Quality. Magic should feel like magic

Compensation, benefits and perks (US):

  • Annual salary range: $225K - $550K
  • Equity is a significant part of total compensation, in addition to salary
  • 401(k) plan with 6% salary matching
  • Generous health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents
  • Unlimited paid time off
  • Visa sponsorship and relocation stipend to bring you to SF, if possible
  • A small, fast-paced, highly focused team

Salary : $225,000 - $550,000

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