Senior/Staff AI Application Engineer - Heterogeneous Computing

Key responsibilities

• Model enablement platform and agent harness: Build the platform that engineers and AI agents use to bring up models: reusable tools to partition, compile, run and profile; environments with access to real hardware; closed-loop runs that apply a change, measure it against the reference and repeat; and verification (differential testing, regression detection) integrated into CI.

• Model ingestion: Own how a PyTorch or ONNX model is captured, analysed and split across the AIPU's matrix and RISC-V vector units, the host CPU and the host's accelerators (GPU, NPU, video decoder), with placement tags that users can read and override. Build this with the graph compiler team so it works for every model.

• Heterogeneous execution: Extend that split to large models, cascades and multi-model pipelines, for example with expert offloading and caching across device and host memory. Agree the plan with the graph compiler team.

• End-to-end performance: With the application team (pipeline builder) and the runtime team, bring each model to its best end-to-end performance: overlap of host and device work, zero-copy buffers, batching, multi-core scheduling, and models with several inputs. Profile device time, host time and data movement, and confirm each speedup in the full pipeline.

• Critical models: Study the models that matter most to customers, on Metis today and on Europa, and turn each lesson into a platform improvement.

Essential

• 8+ years of engineering experience in systems, compilers, runtimes or performance, including system-level design ownership.

• Hands-on experience with heterogeneous computing across CPU, GPU, DSP, NPU or FPGA, including reasoning about compute, memory bandwidth, latency and data movement.

• Solid fundamentals in computer architecture, operating systems and parallel programming.

• Familiarity with ML graph representations and compiler concepts: graph capture (torch.export, FX, ONNX), lowering, operator fusion, partitioning, memory planning.

• Strong C++ and Python.

• Daily use of AI coding agents on real engineering work, with the judgment to review and test their output.

Preferred

• Hands-on experience with MLIR or another compiler framework (TVM, XLA, TorchInductor, IREE).

• Experience with an inference runtime or execution engine (ONNX Runtime execution providers, a custom NPU or DSP runtime).

• Experience with GPU compute (CUDA, OpenCL, Vulkan) or SIMD optimization on Arm or x86.

• Experience with large-model execution techniques such as offloading, expert caching, speculative decoding, pipelining across devices.

• Experience building agent environments, evaluation harnesses or verification frameworks (differential testing, regression detection), or MCP-based tooling.

We offer a flexible working arrangement, with options to

• Work from one of our Axelera AI offices (Leuven in Belgium, Amsterdam and Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Zurich in Switzerland, Florence and Milan in Italy or Bristol in the United Kingdom) if you're already based in the vicinity.

• Work fully remotely from any European country (incl. the UK) you are already in.

• Relocate with us and work from Italy (Florence or Milan) or the Netherlands (Amsterdam or Eindhoven).

Kindly note that priority will be given to candidates who are [interested in being] based in Belgium or Italy.