Senior MLOps & LLM Performance Engineer (JAX/CUDA) - $90-$120/hr

APPLY DIRECTLY HERE: https://t.mercor.com/Tdeld

Role Overview Join a leading AI lab’s cutting-edge GenAI team to build foundational AI models from the ground up. We’re seeking elite MLOps and ML Systems Engineers with hands-on expertise in LLM infrastructure (accelerator kernel programming, performance profiling, debugging distributed workloads, and high-throughput inference serving).

Please note: This is a 100% remote, full-time (40 hours/week) engagement open worldwide. It requires full dedication (no concurrent engagements/conflicts).

Key Responsibilities

• Design extraordinarily challenging tasks across kernels (e.g., Pallas kernels on TPU), profiling, debugging, and inference serving to expose where frontier models fail on accelerator code.
• Write accurate, well-structured solutions and evaluate AI-generated ML systems code, providing clear technical feedback that stands up to expert review.
• Develop detailed rubrics covering kernel optimization, profiler output interpretation, distributed systems reasoning, and serving latency trade-offs.

Core Qualifications

• Experience: 2+ years of highly technical, hands-on professional experience in ML systems, ML infrastructure, model serving, or accelerator performance engineering. (This is a systems role, not an applied data science role).
• Hardware & Frameworks: Deep working production experience with JAX and/or PyTorch. Experience with custom operators, sharding (FSDP, Megatron), or graph-level work (XLA, MLIR) is a strong plus.
• Accelerators & Kernels: Hands-on experience writing/optimizing custom kernels (Pallas, Triton, CUDA, CUTLASS) and working with modern accelerators (TPU v4-v6e, H100, MI300).
• Inference & Serving: Practical experience serving LLMs at scale using frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM (continuous batching, paged attention).
• Availability: Must be able to commit to 40 hours per week exclusively.

Engagement Details & Compensation

• Work Structure: Fully remote independent contractor role (managed via Cincinnatus LLC or a local EOR depending on your country). Flexible schedule within the 40-hour requirement.
• Compensation: Highly competitive flat rate of $90.00 to $120.00 per hour .
• Payments: Processed securely and weekly via Stripe or Wise based on services rendered.

(We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.)