Staff Engineer, system design engineering

Sandisk•Milpitas, CA

19h

About The Position

The ideal candidate will be responsible for designing, defining, implementing, and enabling comprehensive benchmark tests for AI infrastructure platforms, including box-level GPU systems, multi-GPU servers, and GPU rack-scale deployments. This role requires a strong understanding of AI workloads, system architectures, and performance characterization methodologies across modern AI infrastructure environments. The individual will work closely with Marketing, Product Management and System Architecture teams to understand benchmark requirements and translate business and customer use cases into measurable performance validation strategies. The candidate will develop benchmark proposals, define evaluation methodologies, and execute performance studies for a wide range of AI applications, including Chat Assistants and LLM inference, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Speech AI, Vision AI, multimodal AI, recommendation systems, and Image/Video Generation workloads. Responsibilities include selecting and optimizing benchmark frameworks, configuring AI software stacks, validating hardware and software performance, analyzing bottlenecks across compute, memory, storage, and networking subsystems, and generating detailed performance reports with actionable insights. The candidate will evaluate AI workloads across different hardware configurations such as GPUs, CPUs, accelerators, high-speed interconnects, NVLink/NVSwitch fabrics, storage architectures, and network fabrics to compare scalability, latency, throughput, power efficiency, and cost-performance metrics. The role also involves collaborating with internal and external partners to enable emerging AI models, benchmark suites, and infrastructure technologies, while ensuring reproducibility, automation, and continuous benchmarking capabilities within AI lab environments. Strong analytical, scripting, and performance tuning skills are essential, along with hands-on experience in AI frameworks, GPU computing, distributed inference environments, and performance monitoring tools.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering with 5+ years of experience, or a Master’s degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering with 2+ years of experience.
Experience with different Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, VMware).
Scripting and/or programming languages, such as Shell scripts, Python, C/C++ are required.
AI Infrastructure & Hardware Awareness – GPU/CPU architecture basics
Experience in Performance & Benchmarking – profiling tools, system bottlenecks
Debugging knowledge on performance bottlenecks in AI pipelines
Experience in deriving data movement costs on Edge platforms

Responsibilities

Design & Validate AI Infrastructure for Benchmarks
Analysis of Benchmarks for End-to-end AI Infrastructure and develop test environment for Benchmark tests
Define and Perform Benchmark tests for AI workloads on storage systems
Evaluate GPU vs CPU vs storage bottlenecks in AI pipelines
Research and innovate Benchmarks for AI workloads on storage specific to Inference & training for major models
Design Benchmarks for Vector DB & KV cache
Optimize Data pipelines for Inference and training
Analyze Benchmark results, document and publish with recommendations
Research and implement innovative ways to validate PCIe/NVMe SSD debug infrastructure.
Work with cross-functional teams for POC and architecture discussions for validation infrastructure.

Benefits

Short-Term Incentive (STI) Plan
Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program (restricted stock units (RSUs) or cash equivalents)
RSU awards for eligible new hires
Paid vacation time
Paid sick leave
Medical/dental/vision insurance
Life, accident and disability insurance
Tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts
Employee assistance program
Other voluntary benefit programs such as supplemental life and AD&D, legal plan, pet insurance, critical illness, accident and hospital indemnity
Tuition reimbursement
Transit
Applause Program
Employee stock purchase plan
Sandisk's Savings 401(k) Plan