Software Engineer - AI Triton Kernels

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc • San Jose, CA

3d

About The Position

Triton is a widely adopted language and compiler for high-performance GPU kernels, powering major AI frameworks such as PyTorch, vLLM, and SGLang. As AI workloads increasingly rely on Triton-based kernels, first-class Triton support is strategically critical to AMD’s AI software roadmap.
AMD GPUs are an official Triton backend; delivering industry-leading Triton performance on AMD Instinct accelerators is a top priority for AMD. The performance and usability of Triton directly impact the competitiveness of AMD hardware in large-scale AI training and inference.
In this role you will author state-of-the-art performant Triton/Gluon kernels for ML kernels powering the latest and greatest AI models.
You will collaborate with research, compiler, and hardware architecture teams to co-design high-performance solutions, analyze bottlenecks to make AMD GPUs the best-in-class platform for Triton-powered AI workloads.
The ideal candidate has deep expertise in SIMT programming, parallel algorithms, GPU architecture, and performance engineering. You are comfortable working across the full stack to drive e2e model performance — from vLLM/SGL down to ISA-level performance tuning — and can perform rigorous quantitative analysis to drive measurable improvements.
You thrive in highly technical environments, enjoy solving complex performance problems, and are excited to collaborate across model deployment, compiler, runtime, and hardware teams. Most importantly, you are curious, hands-on, and willing to learn and work across boundaries.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in GPU kernel development, compiler backends, or performance engineering focused on AI/ML workloads
• Strong hands-on expertise with Triton, including writing custom matmul, attention, and fused transformer kernels and understanding Triton IR lowering to GPU backends
• Deep understanding of modern GPU architectures (wavefront execution, memory hierarchy, scheduling, occupancy)
• Meaningful contributions to open-source projects such as Triton, Torch, vLLM, SGLang, IREE, MLIR, LLVM, or ROCm, with a strong collaborative and upstream-first engineering mindset
• Proven ability to mentor junior engineers and drive kernel optimization efforts in a fast-paced, research-driven environment

Responsibilities

• Design, research, implement, and rigorously optimize high-performance matmul, attention (flash, paged, grouped-query), MoE, and fully fused transformer kernels using Triton, targeting large-scale LLM and multimodal workloads
• Own and productionize critical Triton/Gluon kernels within vLLM and SGL (e.g., paged attention, extend attention, MoE, quantized kernels, etc), ensuring correctness, scalability, and peak throughput
• Partner closely with compiler engineers to develop and maintain the Triton AMD backend across ROCm and the LLVM AMDGPU stack, targeting CDNA and next-generation architectures
• Drive deep kernel-level optimizations across the AMD memory hierarchy (LDS, L2, HBM), wavefront execution (wave32/wave64), vectorization, MFMA utilization, occupancy tuning, and instruction scheduling to maximize hardware efficiency
• Perform rigorous profiling and microbenchmarking led optimization on AMD Instinct GPUs using hardware counters and tracing tools; root-cause bottlenecks in memory bandwidth, latency hiding, synchronization, and register pressure
• Debug and resolve performance and correctness issues end-to-end across PyTorch, vLLM/SGL runtimes, Triton IR/MLIR, ROCm runtime, and the LLVM AMDGPU backend
• Collaborate closely with GPU architecture and performance teams to co-design performance-critical features
• Contribute to open-source Triton, LLVM, and ROCm ecosystems

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level