# AI Performance Engineer Source: https://realanalystjobs.com/job/ai-performance-engineer-applied-intuition-25fd552c AI Performance Engineer at Applied Intuition, an on-site role based in Sunnyvale, California, USA. Pay stated in the posting: $215K to $285K. Posted on 12 August 2026, read from Applied Intuition's own careers page (Ashby), which RealAnalystJobs re-checks daily and removes the role when it closes. Applied Intuition has approved H-1B petitions on USCIS record (employer-wide, not a promise for this role). Updated 15 November 2026. ## Key facts - Company: [Applied Intuition](https://realanalystjobs.com/companies/applied-intuition) - Location: Sunnyvale, California, USA - Work mode: On-site - Pay stated in the posting: $215K to $285K - Posted: Aug 12, 2026 - Employment type: Full time - Source: Applied Intuition's careers page (Ashby), re-checked daily Skills: [Python](https://realanalystjobs.com/skills/python) ## Visa sponsorship The posting does not say. Applied Intuition had H-1B petitions approved for 131 workers in fiscal year 2026 (USCIS). That is history, not a promise for this role. [See the record](https://realanalystjobs.com/companies/applied-intuition#h1b-record) ## About this role Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo. Learn more at applied.co . We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that full-time employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week. However, we also recognize the importance of flexibility and trust our employees to manage their schedules responsibly. This may include occasional remote work, starting the day with morning meetings from home before heading to the office, or leaving earlier when needed to accommodate family commitments. This in-office expectation does not apply to contractor positions About the Role We are looking for a performance engineer who specializes in making large-scale machine learning workloads fast and cost-efficient in the datacenter. This role is focused on distributed training runs spanning many nodes, and high-throughput batch inference sweeping petabytes of real-world autonomy logs for auto-labeling, data mining, ground-truth generation, and evaluation. The optimization target here is not tail latency on a vehicle - it is throughput, cluster goodput, and cost per unit of data processed. A training run that wastes 30% of its GPU-hours on stalled data loaders, or an offline inference sweep that takes a week instead of a day, directly slows down how fast the whole company can iterate. You will own the gap between what our fleet of accelerators is theoretically capable of and what our workloads actually achieve: profiling across the stack, finding where the compute and the wall-clock time actually go, and closing the difference. You will work at the intersection of accelerators, ML frameworks, and large-scale data infrastructure, partnering with the teams who own each layer to land wins that show up in training time-to-result and offline processing cost. At Applied, we encourage all engineers to take ownership over technical and product decisions, closely interact with users to collect feedback, and contribute to a thoughtful, dynamic team culture. At Applied, you will: • Profile and optimize distributed training end to end - data loading and preprocessing, augmentation, kernel execution, gradient communication, and checkpointing • Optimize large-scale offline and batch inference over petabyte-scale sensor logs: batching and scheduling strategies, quantization and low-precision execution, graph optimization, and accelerator saturation across long-running sweeps • Establish roofline and performance models for our workloads, quantify the gap between achieved and theoretical performance, and stack-rank optimization opportunities by impact and effort • Improve multi-node scaling efficiency: sharding and parallelism strategies, collective communication, interconnect utilization, and memory-bandwidth and kernel-fusion bottlenecks • Drive cluster goodput - reduce GPU idle time from input pipeline stalls, storage and network I/O, scheduling gaps, stragglers, and failure recovery on long-running jobs • Build the benchmarking, observability, and regression-detection tooling that keeps performance from silently degrading as models and code evolve • Collaborate with engineers across functions to solve complex data and compute problems at scale • Contribute to a team culture that values effective collaboration, technical excellence, and innovation We're looking for someone who has: • Bachelor's degree or higher in computer science or adjacent fields. • 1 or more years of hands-on experience with ML performance engineering: profiling, roofline analysis, throughput optimization, and root-cause investigation in production systems. • 5 or more years of overall experience • Experience with distributed multi-node training at scale (FSDP, DeepSpeed, Megatron, NCCL, or equivalent), including diagnosing scaling inefficiency as node count grows • Deep familiarity with GPU or accelerator performance concepts - memory bandwidth, kernel launch overhead, occupancy, quantization, collective communication • Experience with high-throughput or batch inference systems (NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, Ray, or similar) • Fluency in Python and proficiency in C++ or another systems language • Excellent debugging, analytical, and problem-solving skills • A deep understanding of machine learning foundations, and the ability to develop technical solutions for problems with no established playbook Nice to have: • GPU kernel development experience: CUDA, Triton, CUTLASS, or hand-tuned attention implementations • Experience with profiling toolchains such as Nsight Systems/Compute, PyTorch Profiler, or perf • Experience with GPU scheduling and orchestration on Kubernetes, Slurm, or Ray, including multi-tenant cluster utilization • Experience with fault tolerance and elastic training for long-running jobs - checkpointing strategy, straggler mitigation, preemption recovery • Familiarity with autonomy or robotics data (ROS, OpenCV, multi-sensor log formats) Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles. Description from Applied Intuition's public careers feed, reproduced so you can read the role here. Apply on the company's own site; Real Analyst Jobs never submits anything for you. ## How to apply Open [this role on Real Analyst Jobs](https://realanalystjobs.com/job/ai-performance-engineer-applied-intuition-25fd552c) and use Apply now there to reach the employer's application. The listing is re-checked against Applied Intuition's careers page daily and removed when it closes. ## Applied Intuition 2 open analyst roles on Real Analyst Jobs. [More roles at Applied Intuition](https://realanalystjobs.com/companies/applied-intuition) ## More like this ### Other open roles at Applied Intuition - [Systems Engineer, Insights and Analytics (SDS Trucking)](https://realanalystjobs.com/job/systems-engineer-insights-and-analytics-sds-trucking-applied-intuition-60d37bb3), Sunnyvale California, USA (On-site) - [Mapping Operations Lead](https://realanalystjobs.com/job/mapping-operations-lead-applied-intuition-0b328593), Sunnyvale California, USA (On-site) - [Data analyst jobs in the USA](https://realanalystjobs.com/jobs/data-analyst-jobs-in-usa) - [Analyst job market report](https://realanalystjobs.com/analyst-job-market) - [What analyst roles pay](https://realanalystjobs.com/blog/data-analyst-salaries) ## Sources and links - [This role on Real Analyst Jobs](https://realanalystjobs.com/job/ai-performance-engineer-applied-intuition-25fd552c) - [Applied Intuition on Real Analyst Jobs](https://realanalystjobs.com/companies/applied-intuition) - [All analyst jobs](https://realanalystjobs.com/jobs)