Principal Performance Modeling Engineer (AI)

Location: Onsite in Mountain View, CA; San Francisco, CA; Santa Clara, CA; New York City, NY; North Reading, MA; or other United States locations

Salary: $250,000-$300,000

Company

Early-stage startup backed by Tier-1 VC, founded by industry veterans, innovating AI infrastructure at chip and system level for better performance-per-watt in large model inference.

What you will do

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

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience in systems, architecture, or EDA domains
• Strong C/C++ and Python skills with 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 startup

Nice to have

• Experience with AI/ML accelerators, GPUs, or heterogeneous systems
• Familiarity with simulators such as gem5, gem5-SALAM, or proprietary modeling tools