Akamai Technologies

Principal Performance Engineer – Lead

Akamai Technologies

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Remote

Location: MassachusettsUnited States

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Salary

💰 $169,300 - $304,700 per year

Job Level

Tech Stack

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