Staff AI Application Engineer - Heterogeneous Computing

Axelera AI is not your regular deep-tech company. We are creating the next-generation AI platform to support anyone who wants to help advancing humanity and improve the world around us.

In just five years, we have raised a total of $450 million and have built a world-class team of 250+ employees (including 60+ PhDs with more than 40,000 citations), both remotely from 21 different countries and with offices in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, the UK, headquartered at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

We have also launched our Metis™ AI Platform, which achieves a 3-5x increase in efficiency and performance, and have visibility into a strong business pipeline exceeding $100 million.

Our unwavering commitment to innovation has firmly established us as a global industry pioneer.

Are you up for the challenge?

As a Staff AI Application Engineer in the Model Enablement team (Application Software), you will build our model enablement platform and decide how each model runs across the Metis or Europa AIPU, the host CPU and the host's accelerators. How this work is split and scheduled determines most of the end-to-end performance a customer sees in the Voyager SDK.

The role combines architecture and hands-on work across the model frontend, the graph compiler, the runtime and the application pipeline. During model bring-up, you cover the frontend and graph side, and a device-side engineer covers the backend.

Our team uses AI coding agents in daily work, and you will use them to build, test and verify your own work. We also welcome experienced field application engineers, technical leads and engineering managers who want to return to hands-on engineering. Experience in planning, delegating and reviewing work transfers well to working with AI agents.

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• 8+ years of engineering experience in systems, compilers, runtimes or performance, including system-level design ownership.

• Hands-on experience with heterogeneous computing across CPU, GPU, DSP, NPU or FPGA, including reasoning about compute, memory bandwidth, latency and data movement.

• Solid fundamentals in computer architecture, operating systems and parallel programming.

• Familiarity with ML graph representations and compiler concepts: graph capture (torch.export, FX, ONNX), lowering, operator fusion, partitioning, memory planning.

• Strong C++ and Python.

• Daily use of AI coding agents on real engineering work, with the judgment to review and test their output.

• Hands-on experience with MLIR or another compiler framework (TVM, XLA, TorchInductor, IREE).

• Experience with an inference runtime or execution engine (ONNX Runtime execution providers, a custom NPU or DSP runtime).

• Experience with GPU compute (CUDA, OpenCL, Vulkan) or SIMD optimization on Arm or x86.

• Experience with large-model execution techniques such as offloading, expert caching, speculative decoding, pipelining across devices.

• Experience building agent environments, evaluation harnesses or verification frameworks (differential testing, regression detection), or MCP-based tooling.

We offer a flexible working arrangement, with options to:

• Work from one of our Axelera AI offices (Leuven in Belgium, Amsterdam and Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Zurich in Switzerland, Florence and Milan in Italy or Bristol in the United Kingdom) if you're already based in the vicinity.

• Work fully remotely from any European country (incl. the UK) you are already in.

• Relocate with us and work from Italy (Florence or Milan) or the Netherlands (Amsterdam or Eindhoven).