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Senior/Staff Software Engineer - LLM Inference Systems & Open-Source

Technology, Data & Digital · Data, AI & Analytics · Machine Learning · Software Engineering · DevOps

In short

Qualcomm seeks experienced software engineers to build and advance LLM inference on their platforms, focusing on open-source LLM serving systems, distributed systems, and AI accelerator software. You will contribute to open-source projects and develop efficient, reliable inference infrastructure for Qualcomm AI accelerators.

Responsibilities

  • Contribute features, improvements, bug fixes, and architectural enhancements to open-source LLM inference projects, including llm-d and other LLM inference and serving projects.
  • Develop and improve support for Qualcomm AI accelerators in open-source LLM serving frameworks.
  • Work with upstream maintainers and open-source communities to design, review, and upstream Qualcomm-related functionality.
  • Develop and enhance inference engine integrations for Qualcomm platforms, including device abstraction, accelerator runtime integration, memory management, distributed execution, compilation, and performance optimization.
  • Develop and improve llm-d integration and deployment capabilities for Qualcomm platforms, including reference architectures, deployment blueprints, configuration, and operational tooling.
  • Design and implement distributed LLM inference capabilities such as prefill/decode disaggregation, KV-cache management and transfer, distributed communication, request routing, model parallelism, multi-node inference, autoscaling, and failure recovery.
  • Integrate LLM inference software with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure.
  • Profile, benchmark, and optimize end-to-end inference performance, including time to first token (TTFT), inter-token latency (ITL), throughput, memory utilization, and scalability.
  • Diagnose complex issues spanning model-serving frameworks, distributed runtimes, operating systems, networking, accelerator runtimes, and hardware.
  • Collaborate with hardware, firmware, compiler, runtime, Kubernetes, and product teams.
  • Develop technical documentation, examples, reference deployments, and best practices.
  • Participate in architecture discussions and influence Qualcomm's open-source LLM inference software strategy.

Requirements

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 4+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.
  • OR Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 3+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.
  • OR PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 2+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.
  • Strong software engineering and debugging skills.
  • Experience developing production-quality software in one or more of Python, C++, Go, or Rust.
  • Strong understanding of at least one of the following areas: Machine learning or LLM inference systems, Distributed systems, AI accelerator or GPU software, Cloud-native/Kubernetes infrastructure, ML compiler or runtime systems.
  • Experience working with complex software systems and debugging problems across multiple layers of the stack.
  • Ability to collaborate effectively across teams and communicate technical concepts clearly.

Desired Qualifications

  • Experience in LLM inference engines, model-serving frameworks, or distributed inference systems.
  • Architecture and implementation of high-performance LLM inference runtimes, including model execution, scheduling, memory management, attention, and KV-cache management.
  • Distributed LLM inference architectures, including prefill/decode disaggregation and KV-cache transfer.
  • llm-d, KServe, Kubernetes Gateway API, Kubernetes operators, or cloud-native AI infrastructure.
  • PyTorch internals, torch.compile, Dynamo, Inductor, Triton, MLIR, or other compiler/runtime technologies.
  • Hardware accelerator software stacks, GPU programming, or custom AI accelerator integration.
  • RDMA, RoCE, GPU Direct-style communication, PCIe, high-speed networking, or distributed communication libraries.
  • Model parallelism, including tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, expert parallelism, and data parallelism.
  • Performance profiling and optimization of distributed AI workloads.
  • Kubernetes scheduling, autoscaling, networking, observability, and production operations.
  • Open-source development, including contributing patches, participating in design discussions, reviewing code, and collaborating with upstream maintainers.
  • Experience working across hardware/software boundaries with hardware, firmware, compiler, runtime, and systems teams.

Benefits

  • Competitive annual discretionary bonus program
  • Opportunity for annual RSU grants
  • Highly competitive benefits package designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play.
  • Access to details about US benefits via a provided link.

Skills

PythonC++GoRustKubernetesLLMMachine LearningOpen-source
#LLM#Inference#Open-source#Software Engineering#Machine Learning#Distributed Systems#Cloud-native#AI Accelerators
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About Qualcomm

Enabling a world where everyone and everything can be intelligently connected.

Enabling a world where everyone and everything can be intelligently connected.\n\n

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Company

Qualcomm

Job Posted

1 week ago

Employment Type

Full Time

Work mode

On Site

Salary

US$162,000–243,000 · Negotiable

Experience Level

Senior

Locations

Santa Clara, United States of America

Qualification

Bachelor, Master, Doctoral

Applicants

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