Software Development Engineer - AI Workload Optimization

About the role

ADVANCE YOUR CAREER. ADVANCE THE WORLD. At AMD, we believe technology has the power to solve the world’s most important challenges. From advancing healthcare and scientific discovery to powering AI and the technologies people rely on every day, innovation at AMD is shaping the future. Whether you’re designing next-gen processors, enabling AI breakthroughs, or bringing leading edge products to market, every role at AMD contributes to something bigger — technology that moves the world forward. Join us and, together, we’ll advance your career.

THE ROLE: We are looking for a visionary technical leader to join the AI Software group. As a Fellow, you will be accountable for defining and driving the end-to-end software optimization strategy to achieve industry-leading performance for our top-tier customers. You will sit at the intersection of architecture, customer engagement, and software engineering, ensuring that AMD’s software stack—from ROCm and compilers to high-level AI frameworks—is tuned to extract maximum performance for the world's most demanding AI workloads. THE PERSON: The ideal candidate is a technical powerhouse with a proven track record of solving complex performance bottlenecks at scale. You possess deep knowledge of AI hardware architecture and software optimization, with the ability to map emerging model architectures to low-level software. You are an exceptional communicator who can translate complex technical challenges into strategic roadmaps and influence senior leadership, while also engaging deeply with key customers to solve their most critical performance needs. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES: Strategic Leadership: Set the technical vision and roadmap for workload optimization across the AI software stack, ensuring AMD remains the platform of choice for top-tier AI customers. Workload Performance Engineering: Lead the profiling, analysis, and tuning of large-scale models (LLMs, Diffusion, Multimodal, and MoE) to ensure "out-of-the-box" performance excellence on AMD hardware. Customer Engagement: Partner with top customers and hyperscalers to understand their unique workload requirements and deliver tailored architectural wins and software optimizations. Hardware-Software Co-design: Collaborate across hardware architecture, compiler, and framework teams to influence future silicon features based on evolving AI workload trends. Ecosystem Innovation: Drive the development of advanced tools and frameworks for performance estimation, modeling, and automated reporting. Community & Mentorship: Act as a technical ambassador in industry forums and open-source communities. Mentor and inspire the next generation of AMD’s technical leaders and engineers. PREFERRED EXPERIENCE: Deep software development experience with experience in a high-level technical leadership role (Fellow or equivalent). Deep expertise in AI Frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, vLLM, SGLang) and the ROCm software stack. Proven history of optimizing distributed inference and training at scale across multi-node/multi-GPU environments. Mastery of performance profiling tools (e.g., TorchProfiler, ROCm Profiler, Nsight) and hardware-level performance modeling. Strong understanding of modern model architectures (Transformer, Attention, KV Cache) and optimization techniques like quantization, speculative decoding, and FlashAttention. Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional initiatives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments. PREFERRED ACADEMIC CREDENTIALS: PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience. Demonstrated research or applied experience in AI/ML, including areas such as deep learning, model training/inference optimization, large language models, or computer vision. LOCATION: Bellevue, WA