
Principal Performance Engineer – Lead
Akamai Technologies
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: Massachusetts • United States
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Salary
💰 $169,300 - $304,700 per year
Job Level
About the role
- Optimize inference performance across the Akamai Inference Cloud
- Collaborate closely with hardware performance engineers to deliver end-to-end optimization
- Apply and evaluate quantization, distillation, and pruning techniques to optimize model performance while preserving accuracy
- Design hardware-aware model placement and scheduling strategies to match models with optimal compute resources
- Implement and tune speculative decoding, KV-cache optimization, and batching strategies to improve inference throughput and latency
- Build benchmarking and profiling pipelines to measure model-layer performance across architectures, hardware, and serving configurations
- Mentor and guide engineers on the team through code reviews, design discussions, and technical problem-solving
- Collaborate with hardware performance engineers to identify and resolve end-to-end performance bottlenecks across the inference stack
Requirements
- 12+ years of relevant experience with a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field
- Possess hands-on experience optimizing LLM inference performance (quantization, speculative decoding, model compression, etc.)
- Have a solid understanding of transformer architectures and how design choices impact latency, throughput, and accuracy
- Possess experience with inference serving frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, Triton, or similar systems
- Be proficient in Python and C++ with experience profiling and optimizing compute-intensive workloads
- Have familiarity with hardware-aware optimization, including GPU/accelerator scheduling and memory management trade-offs
Benefits
- healthcare
- 401K savings plan
- company holidays
- vacation (in the form of PTO)
- sick time
- family friendly benefits including parental leave
- employee assistance program including a focus on mental and financial wellness
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
optimizationquantizationdistillationpruningspeculative decodingKV-cache optimizationbatching strategiesprofilingmodel compressiontransformer architectures
Soft Skills
mentoringcollaborationtechnical problem-solvingcode reviewsdesign discussions
Certifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer ScienceMaster's degree in Machine Learning