Senior Performance Engineer, Inference

Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Cerebras Systems

Sunnyvale, CA

On-site

Posted April 17, 2026

Job Description

Cerebras Systems builds the world's largest AI chip, 56 times larger than GPUs. Our novel wafer-scale architecture provides the AI compute power of dozens of GPUs on a single chip, with the programming simplicity of a single device. This approach allows Cerebras to deliver industry-leading training and inference speeds and empowers machine learning users to effortlessly run large-scale ML applications, without the hassle of managing hundreds of GPUs or TPUs.

Cerebras' current customers include top model labs, global enterprises, and cutting-edge AI-native startups. OpenAI recently announced a multi-year partnership with Cerebras, to deploy 750 megawatts of scale, transforming key workloads with ultra high-speed inference.

Thanks to the groundbreaking wafer-scale architecture, Cerebras Inference offers the fastest Generative AI inference solution in the world, over 10 times faster than GPU-based hyperscale cloud inference services. This order of magnitude increase in speed is transforming the user experience of AI applications, unlocking real-time iteration and increasing intelligence via additional agentic computation.

About The Role

We are hiring a Senior Performance Engineer to join our Product team. You are an expert on state-of-the-art inference performance and will serve as our resident expert on how Cerebras stacks up against alternative inference providers on both price and performance. This role sits at the intersection of performance benchmarking from first principles and competitive intelligence. The role has two core pillars:

Performance Benchmarking
You will build, run, and maintain reproducible benchmarks that measure Cerebras inference performance for real customer workloads. This includes metrics like tokens per second, time to first token, latency under concurrency, and total cost of ownership (TCO).
Competitive Pricing Intelligence
You will build and maintain a living model of competitor pricing across the AI inference landscape, including cloud providers, custom silicon vendors, and inference API platforms. You will work directly with our Sales and Product teams to translate this intelligence into pricing recommendations for enterprise contracts, ensuring Cerebras offers a compelling value proposition for every customer.

This role requires deep, hands-on fluency with open-source inference stacks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM), GPU kernel-level optimization toolchains (CUDA, Triton), and an intuitive understanding of how transformer architecture decisions—attention mechanisms, model sizing, quantization, KV-cache strategies—interact with the realities of GPU memory hierarchies and compute budgets.

Responsibilities

Design standardized benchmark suites for inference workloads (code generation, summarization, multi-turn conversation, agentic tool use) that enable fair, reproducible comparisons.
Stay current with GPU optimization communities (CUDA, Triton, TensorRT) and evaluate how new kernel fusions, flash-attention variants, and quantization techniques shift performance ceilings.
Build and continuously update a competitive prici

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