[Hiring] Principal Performance Engineer Lead @Akamai

Role Description

Do you want to push the boundaries of AI inference speed and accuracy at global scale? Are you passionate about optimizing how models perform in production serving environments? Join the Akamai Inference Cloud Team!

The Akamai Inference Cloud team is part of Akamai's Cloud Technology Group. We design and operate AI platforms that enable customers to run models with unmatched performance, compliance, and economics. The Model Intelligence & Lifecycle team owns the end-to-end model lifecycle from validation and security scanning through quantization, optimization, and monitoring. We ensure every model meets rigorous standards for quality, safety, and performance.

As an ML Performance Engineer Principal Lead, you will be responsible for:

• Applying and evaluating quantization, distillation, and pruning techniques to optimize model performance while preserving accuracy.
• Designing hardware-aware model placement and scheduling strategies to match models with optimal compute resources.
• Implementing and tuning speculative decoding, KV-cache optimization, and batching strategies to improve inference throughput and latency.
• Building benchmarking and profiling pipelines to measure model-layer performance across architectures, hardware, and serving configurations.
• Mentoring and guiding engineers on the team through code reviews, design discussions, and technical problem-solving.
• Collaborating with hardware performance engineers to identify and resolve end-to-end performance bottlenecks across the inference stack.

Qualifications

• 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

• Opportunities to grow, flourish, and achieve great things.
• Benefits surrounding all aspects of your life:
• Your health
• Your finances
• Your family
• Your time at work
• Your time pursuing other endeavors
• Industry-leading benefits including healthcare, 401K savings plan, company holidays, vacation (in the form of PTO), sick time, family-friendly benefits including parental leave, and an employee assistance program focusing on mental and financial wellness.

Company Description

Akamai powers and protects life online. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences helping billions of people live, work, and play every day. With the world's most distributed compute platform from cloud to edge, we make it easy for customers to develop and run applications while we keep experiences closer to users and threats farther away.