Principal Model Researcher

Ericsson • Austin, TX

21h

About The Position

Principal AI Model Architect — Silicon-Software Co-Design
Austin, Texas

The Voice of the Model. The Architect of the Machine.
The Mission
Most AI architects optimize models for hardware that already exists. You're going to shape the hardware around the model — before a single transistor is placed.
As our Principal AI Model Architect, you occupy the most strategically critical seat in our entire silicon program. You are the living contract between what our researchers dream up and what our silicon team can physically build. You are the person in the room who looks at a state-of-the-art Transformer architecture and answers the question no one else can:
"Here's exactly how we break this apart, map it across our heterogeneous ASIC, and run it faster than anyone else on earth — and here's the proof."
This isn't model fine-tuning. This isn't prompt engineering. This is deep, architecture-level surgery — partitioning massive parameter models, defining tiling strategies, projecting cycle-accurate performance on silicon that doesn't exist yet, and ensuring the SDK team has a mathematically airtight path to make it all real.
Your decisions don't just influence software. They get etched into silicon.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
The Hardware-Software Bridge — Own the Translation Layer
You'll take bleeding-edge AI and RAN algorithms — Transformers, Grouped Query Attention, Rotary Positional Embeddings — and convert them into precise hardware specifications for the ASIC team and concrete lowering requirements for the SDK team. You're not summarizing research. You're operationalizing it, making it real at the level of memory hierarchies, dataflow patterns, and execution units.
Model Partitioning & Tiling — Shatter the Model
You'll define the strategies for how massive, multi-hundred-million parameter models get decomposed and mapped across heterogeneous compute fabrics. Tensor parallelism, pipeline stages, tiling across HBM and on-chip SRAM — you'll architect the playbook that determines how every layer lives and breathes on custom silicon.
Golden Model Ownership — Guard the Source of Truth
You'll own and maintain the canonical reference implementations in JAX and PyTorch — the undisputed "Source of Truth" that the entire program aligns to. When the MLIR-compiled output lands on silicon, it's your models that prove whether the math held. You'll work hand-in-hand with the SDK team to ensure that what the researcher intended and what the hardware executes are identical, bit for bit.
Performance Projection — See the Future in Cycles
Before a single line of RTL is written, you'll be projecting performance. Using cycle-accurate simulators, SystemC models, and your own deep intuition for how model architectures behave under hardware constraints, you'll give the silicon team the confidence to make tape-out decisions that cost millions of dollars. You are the signal in the noise.
Join our Team
What You Bring

Requirements

• Model Architecture Mastery
• Hardware-Aware ML — The Rare Skill
• Framework Depth — Down to the Graph
• Performance Modeling

Nice To Haves

• Telecommunications DNA
• Compiler Curiosity
• Numeric Sensitivity

Responsibilities

• The Hardware-Software Bridge — Own the Translation Layer
• Model Partitioning & Tiling — Shatter the Model
• Golden Model Ownership — Guard the Source of Truth
• Performance Projection — See the Future in Cycles

Benefits

• Ericsson offers excellent health benefits including the choice of three medical plan options and a dental plan option that allow an employee to select the level of coverage that suits their needs. Employees will receive company credits in an amount equal to the cost that Ericsson pays toward the cost of their medical and dental premiums for themselves and eligible covered dependents.
• The Ericsson US 401(k) Plan offers an automatic 3% company contribution and Ericsson match $1 for every $1 you put into the 401(k) Plan on the first 3% of your eligible pay, plus 50 cents on every $1 on the next 2% of eligible pay. When you contribute at least 5% of eligible pay, you are receiving Ericsson’s full matching contributions of 4%. Matching and company automatic contributions stop when your total eligible pay for the year reaches the IRS limits. Employees will also receive company credits in an amount equal to the cost of basic life insurance and basic accidental death and dismemberment coverage, as well as short-term and long-term disability coverage. Employees also have the option to participate in Ericsson’s Stock Purchase Plan.
• New employees are provided a minimum of 15 days of accrued vacation, up to 3 personal days per year, 11 annual holidays, 8 hours of volunteer time, and 80 hours of sick time annually. Please note paid time off is pro-rated based on the employee’s start date. Furthermore, Ericsson provides up to 16 weeks of paid maternity leave and 6 weeks of parental or adoption leave at 100% of pay.
• Ericsson offers many other company-paid benefits such as financial wellness programs, educational assistance, matching gifts, and recognition programs.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees