ML Compiler & System

About the role

WHAT QUADRANTS IS

Quadrants is an open-source translation layer that turns ordinary Python into optimized machine code at runtime, across CPU (Arm64, x86) and GPU (AMDGPU, CUDA, Metal, Vulkan) backends. CUDA is the primary target, with x86 the strong runner-up, especially for real-time simulation. The others drive adoption and support fast prototyping for research.

The ambition is explicit: build the best “Python compiler” in the world for physics and performance-critical numerical computing. We are fully committed to it, and we intend to beat leading alternatives like Nvidia Warp, Numba, or Triton.

It’s a standalone project with its own roadmap, built in the open. Genesis, our physics simulator, is its first and top-priority user, the source of its hardest workloads and its benchmarks. But Quadrants is general-purpose infrastructure for anyone writing performance-critical numerical Python, not an internal tool that happens to be public.

The bet: high-performance code should feel natural to write. Engineers write plain Python in a NumPy or PyTorch style, and Quadrants makes it fast.

THE ROLE

You own Quadrants end to end: the API, the IR and lowering, the optimization passes, the numerical primitives, and the roadmap.

Our ultimate objective: engineers write for readability and maintainability, never for performance. They write the version of an algorithm they are most comfortable with, and Quadrants rebuilds it into kernels that run as if an expert had hand-tuned them. Performance is the compiler’s job, not theirs. Getting there is a frontier problem, part research and part engineering, and we intend to define the state of the art on it, relentlessly pushing the limit further.

It calls for two things at once: the low-level GPU and compiler skill to make a single kernel optimal, and the ability to keep the whole system coherent as it grows.

The core tradeoff is settled: usability comes first. When usability and performance collide, usability wins, unless the cost is severe. We will limit what the system supports to go fast (static shapes and fixed-size allocation baked into kernels, say), but never the convenience of the API itself. Experts who want maximum performance and full control over the generated code get lower-level escape hatches, down to inline assembly, C, or PTX.

WHAT YOU’LL OWN

- API & authoring experience. The surface that physics and numerical-computing engineers write against, and, as an open-source library, the product’s face to the world. Idiomatic, natural to Python users, never a separate language bolted onto Python. Clean decorators, legible constraints, sharp errors, real escape hatches.

- IR, lowering & backends. A stable IR that lowers to multiple backends, with room to grow and the door kept open for differentiable simulation. Today the computation graph is expressed through Quadrants’ own constructs. Recovering it automatically from ordinary Python is hard, and a long-term goal rather than today’s reality.