MLOps Engineer, LLM Systems (Serving, GPU Kernels, Profiling)

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About the Role

Join a leading AI lab's cutting-edge GenAI team to be at the core of the AI revolution, where your expertise fuels the development of the most advanced Large Language Models. Join a leading AI lab's cutting-edge GenAI team and help build foundational AI models from the ground up. We're seeking MLOps Engineers with hands-on experience in large language model infrastructure across any of four areas: GPU kernel programming, performance profiling and trace analysis, debugging accelerated and distributed workloads, and high-throughput inference serving. This role involves AI model training and evaluation work, including writing and assessing MLOps and ML systems tasks and solutions to generate high-quality training data for frontier AI systems. This is a W-2 employment position with Cincinnatus LLC, with the opportunity to be placed at a leading AI Lab as part of their extended workforce. This is a 40-hour full-time engagement, with no conflicts/no other engagements.

What You'll Do

• Design challenging, domain-relevant tasks across four areas, GPU kernels, performance profiling, debugging, and inference serving, and write accurate, well-structured solutions to them.
• Guide research and engineering teams to close knowledge gaps and improve AI model performance on ML systems, training infrastructure, and framework-level topics.
• Evaluate MLOps and ML systems tasks and solutions, and provide clear, written technical feedback that stands up to reviewer scrutiny.
• Develop guidelines and detailed rubrics or evaluation frameworks covering kernel-level optimization, profiler output interpretation, distributed systems reasoning, and serving throughput and latency trade-offs.
• Collaborate with other subject matter experts to keep training data consistent and accurate.

You're a Good Fit If You

• 2+ years of hands-on professional experience in ML systems, ML infrastructure, model serving, or GPU and accelerator performance engineering. This is a hands-on systems role rather than an applied modelling or data science one.
• Practical experience in at least one of the following, with more than one a strong plus: writing or optimizing custom GPU kernels (CUDA, Triton, Pallas); performance profiling and trace analysis (Kineto, torch.profiler, Nsight, XLA or JAX profiler); debugging distributed or accelerator-bound workloads; serving large language models at scale (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, Ray Serve, KV cache, paged attention, continuous batching).
• Working production experience with JAX and/or PyTorch. Framework-level depth is a strong plus: custom operators, distributed training (FSDP, DDP, DeepSpeed, Megatron), or compiler and graph-level work.
• Familiarity with modern accelerators such as A100, H100, B200 or TPU, and the ability to reason about throughput, latency and memory trade-offs.
• Demonstrable career progression.
• Ability to engage reliably for at least 40 hours/week during weekdays.
• Strong written communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly.

Role Highlights

Pay & Payout

Independent contractor engagement. Apply via the link below - Mercor handles onboarding and pays weekly via Stripe or Wise.

Common Questions

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