Senior/Principal AI Performance Engineer

POSITION SUMMARY

CIQ is seeking a highly experienced Senior or Principal AI Engineer to own and drive AI/ML innovation across our product portfolio. This role sits at the intersection of AI engineering and systems performance - the right candidate brings deep expertise in model inference optimization, training workflows, and production AI deployment, combined with a strong instinct for performance at the systems level.

In this role, you will be the AI engineering standard-bearer at CIQ. You will design and build turnkey AI workload examples - both internal reference pipelines and customer-facing solutions - ensuring that CIQ’s AI story is always compelling, practical, and demonstrably best-in-class. You will integrate deeply with Fuzzball, CIQ’s cloud-native computing platform, running AI workloads end-to-end through it and helping customers do the same.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

This role is leveled as Senior or Principal based on qualifications and demonstrated capabilities.

AI Inference Optimization

• Design, implement, and tune inference pipelines for large language models and other AI workloads, targeting maximum throughput and minimum latency.
• Apply state-of-the-art optimization techniques: quantization (INT4/INT8/FP8), model pruning, speculative decoding, continuous batching, and kernel fusion.
• Optimize inference-serving stacks, including vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, ONNX Runtime, and similar frameworks, for production deployment on CIQ’s OS platform.
• Profile and tune GPU/accelerator utilization across the full inference stack, from model weights and memory bandwidth to CUDA kernels and driver overhead.
• Establish inference performance baselines and regression detection across CIQ’s AI-focused solutions.

AI Training Workflows

• Design and optimize distributed training pipelines for large-scale models, including data, model, tensor, and pipeline parallelism strategies.
• Tune training efficiency through mixed-precision training, gradient checkpointing, activation recomputation, and optimizer-level improvements.
• Benchmark training throughput and scaling efficiency across multi-GPU and multi-node configurations on CIQ’s infrastructure.
• Collaborate with infrastructure and performance teams to resolve training bottlenecks at the network (RDMA/InfiniBand), storage, and OS layers.
• Stay current on frontier model architectures and training techniques, including MoE models, RLHF pipelines, and emerging post-training methods.

Turn-Key AI Examples & Reference Workloads

• Build and maintain a library of turn-key AI workload examples that run on CIQ’s platform, covering inference serving, fine-tuning, batch processing, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows.
• Develop both internal reference pipelines for CI/testing and customer-facing examples designed for immediate productivity on CIQ’s OS and Fuzzball.
• Package workloads using containers to deliver portable, reproducible AI environments across HPC and cloud-native settings.
• Create compelling, well-documented demos and reference architectures that communicate CIQ’s AI capabilities to technical and business audiences alike.
• Partner with product and customer success teams to translate real-world AI use cases into reusable, production-quality examples.

AI Engineering & Tooling

• Build and maintain AI-powered engineering tooling - leveraging LLM-based agents, automated analysis pipelines, and AI-assisted code generation to accelerate the broader engineering organization.
• Champion an AI-first development culture: identify opportunities where AI tooling can reduce toil, surface insights faster, and improve software quality across CIQ’s products.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging AI frameworks, libraries, and hardware as they become relevant to CIQ’s customers and product roadmap.
• Contribute to open-source AI tooling and frameworks where relevant, reinforcing CIQ’s technical reputation in the community.

Fuzzball Integration

• Develop deep expertise in CIQ’s Fuzzball platform, its architecture, scheduling model, and workload execution environment.
• Integrate AI training, inference, and pipeline workloads into Fuzzball-based CI/CD and production pipelines.
• Contribute to Fuzzball’s AI workload story: ensure the platform is a first-class environment for running AI workloads efficiently and at scale.
• Help characterize and improve Fuzzball’s performance for AI-specific access patterns and resource demands.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Develop broad familiarity with the full CIQ product portfolio, including Rocky Linux and RLC (and its variants), Fuzzball, Apptainer, and Warewulf, and understand how AI workloads interact with each layer.
• Collaborate closely with the Performance Engineering team to ensure AI workloads benefit from and contribute to CIQ’s systems-level optimization work.
• Partner with product and customer success teams to translate real-world AI pain points into engineering priorities and measurable outcomes.
• Document and communicate findings clearly, from low-level profiling data to executive-level summaries.
• Contribute to technical publications, conference presentations, and thought leadership that reinforces CIQ’s reputation as an AI-forward infrastructure company.

NEEDED TO SUCCEED

Successful candidates will have: 

• Deep, hands-on expertise in LLM inference optimization: including serving frameworks (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, ONNX Runtime), quantization techniques, and GPU memory management.
• Strong background in distributed AI training, including frameworks such as PyTorch FSDP, DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM, or JAX/XLA.
• Proven experience building production AI pipelines and packaging AI environments for reproducible, portable deployment (containers, Apptainer/Singularity, or equivalent).
• Fluency with GPU/accelerator profiling tools: NVIDIA Nsight, PyTorch Profiler, CUDA performance analysis, and related tooling.
• Familiarity with HPC environments: job schedulers (Slurm, PBS), parallel filesystems, RDMA/InfiniBand, and MPI,  and the intersection of HPC with modern AI workloads.
• Experience integrating AI workloads into CI/CD pipelines and building automated testing and benchmarking frameworks.
• Comfort using and building with LLM-based tools and agentic frameworks to accelerate engineering work.
• Excellent analytical skills and able to form hypotheses, design experiments, and draw actionable conclusions from complex profiling data.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to present findings to both deeply technical audiences and business stakeholders.
• A collaborative, humble, and always-learning mindset, combined with the confidence to champion AI engineering as a first-class concern.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Engineering, or a related field strongly preferred; equivalent industry experience considered.
• 10+ years of industry experience in AI/ML engineering, systems software, or a closely related discipline.
• Demonstrated track record of measurable, published, or production-deployed AI performance improvements at scale.
• Experience working in or with open-source AI ecosystems (PyTorch, Triton, ONNX, Hugging Face, etc.) is a strong plus.
• Background with cloud-native, containerized, and/or HPC computing environments preferred.