ML Performance Engineer

Permanent contract
Paris
Occasional remote
Salary: Not specified
Experience: > 3 years
Education: Master's Degree

Sigma Nova
Sigma Nova

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Questions and answers about the job

The position

Job description

We are looking for a Performance ML Engineer to optimise the efficiency and cost of our machine learning models, preparing them for large-scale deployment.

Currently, we operate with 8x H100 GPUs in a single-node configuration, which serves our immediate research and development needs, but we anticipate scaling up to clusters of 64+ H100 in the coming years, with compute needs reaching millions of GPU hours annually.

Your mission: Maximise model performance (latency, throughput, cost per inference) through advanced optimisation techniques (quantisation, distillation, CUDA/Triton kernels, GPU profiling), while preparing our architecture for future scalability.

What You’ll Do

  • Designing systems for distributed training and inference:

    • Build scalable distributed training pipelines

    • Debug foundational model trainings

    • Oversee and scale up GPU clusters

  • Optimisation:

    • Profile GPU usage and bottlenecks

    • Optimise models, implementing techniques such as quantisation, distillation or kernel improvements

  • Collaboration:

    • Work with the R&D team to integrate optimisations into production pipelines.

    • Document benchmarks and performance gains (latency, cost, accuracy).

    • Stay up to date on new architectures (e.g., H200, TPU).


Preferred experience

Required Skills

  • Model Optimisation Experience: Quantisation, distillation, or kernel optimisation (CUDA/Triton).

    • PyTorch Mastery: Deep understanding of internals (memory, attention, custom ops).
  • GPU Profiling: Experience with Nsight Systems/Compute or similar tools (e.g., PyTorch Profiler).

  • Distributed training: DDP, FSDP.

  • Mixed Precision: FP16/BF16, loss scaling, and troubleshooting.

  • Problem-Solving: Ability to diagnose performance issues and propose innovative solutions.

  • Fluent English (the team speaks English in the day-to-day)

Bonus Skills

  • Experience with Triton or custom CUDA kernels.

  • Knowledge of ML compilers (e.g., Apache TVM, TensorRT).

  • Experience with large-scale GPU clusters (even modest ones).

  • Open-source contributions or publications on model optimisation.

  • Experience with one or more of these domains: neurology, multi-modality, (conditional) generation or interpretability.

Beyond Technical Skills:

While technical excellence is critical, we place equal importance on how we work together. We believe the best teams are built on:

  • Integrity & Respect

    • We are striving for honesty, kindness, and fairness. We value people who treat others with dignity and foster an environment where everyone feels heard.
  • Open Communication & Humility

    • Great ideas come from collaboration. We look for teammates who listen actively, communicate clearly, and approach challenges with self-awareness and humility.
  • Psychological Safety & Camaraderie

    • We strive to create a space where people feel safe to take risks, ask questions, and grow.

Recruitment process

  • Prescreen with Paul (Head of People)

  • Technical Screen with one Research Engineer

  • On-site (Take-home exercise and restitution OR onsite interviews + Behavioural interview)

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