[Remote in US] AI Kernel Engineer – RISC-V Software Stack
3 days ago
Moreno Valley
Overview Mentium Technologies Inc. is seeking an Embedded Software Engineer to develop and optimize high-performance compute software for our custom RISC-V-based vision AI accelerator. You will work at the intersection of embedded systems, computer architecture, and machine learning, developing high-performance compute kernels, runtime components, libraries, and developer-facing SDK tools. A key part of the role will be efficiently mapping compute-intensive workloads such as convolution, matrix multiplication, and signal-processing operations onto a multicore RISC-V SoC. The role focuses heavily on vector/SIMD execution, memory optimization, data movement, multicore parallelism, and low-level performance optimization. Prior RISC-V experience is valuable but not required. Engineers with backgrounds in ARM NEON/SVE, x86 SIMD/AVX, DSP software, GPU kernel programming, embedded performance optimization, or other low-level parallel architectures are encouraged to apply. You will collaborate closely with RTL design, system architecture, software, and machine learning teams to turn architectural capabilities into a practical, high-performance, and extensible software platform. Key Responsibilities • Develop and optimize high-performance ML and DSP compute kernels, including operations such as convolution, matrix multiplication, activation functions, pooling, image-processing primitives, and related numerical workloads, • Optimize computationally intensive C/C++ code for vector/SIMD execution, multicore processing, and the SoC memory hierarchy, • Build reusable compute libraries, runtime components, APIs, and developer-facing components for the Mentium SDK, • Develop efficient data-movement, memory-management, and workload-scheduling strategies, • Optimize the use of caches, scratchpad memories, DMA engines, and on-chip memory resources, • Profile workloads and identify compute, memory-bandwidth, synchronization, and system-level performance bottlenecks, • Perform low-level performance analysis using profiling, benchmarking, cycle measurements, and hardware/software debugging tools, • Integrate optimized compute kernels and runtime components into AI model deployment and inference workflows, • Develop functional tests, performance benchmarks, reference examples, and SDK documentation, • Collaborate closely with RTL and system-architecture engineers to validate hardware features and improve end-to-end system performance, • Contribute to the architecture and programming model of Mentium's RISC-V accelerator software stack, • Evaluate and adapt relevant open-source libraries, runtimes, compiler technologies, and numerical software, • Help define software requirements and provide feedback that influences future hardware architecture Required Qualifications • Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience, • 3+ years of combined relevant industry, graduate research, doctoral research, or applied research experience, • Strong programming skills in C and/or C++, • Experience developing or optimizing performance-critical software, • Experience with at least one area of low-level performance programming, such as:, • SIMD or vector programming, • DSP programming, • GPU kernel programming, • Assembly or intrinsic-based optimization, • Performance-critical embedded software, • Numerical or high-performance computing, • Solid understanding of computer architecture, memory systems, and parallel processing, • Experience with performance profiling, benchmarking, low-level debugging, or cycle-level optimization, • Familiarity with computational workloads such as convolution, matrix multiplication, image processing, signal processing, or other numerical kernels, • Ability to reason about memory access patterns, data locality, computational efficiency, and hardware utilization, • Ability to read hardware specifications and work effectively with hardware and RTL engineers, • Proficiency with Python for testing, automation, benchmarking, tooling, or application development, • Experience with Git and standard collaborative software-development practices, • Strong written and verbal communication skills Preferred Qualifications Experience in several of the following areas is valuable, but we do not expect candidates to have experience with all of them: • RISC-V instruction-set architecture or the RISC-V Vector Extension (RVV), • ARM NEON or SVE, x86 SSE/AVX, DSP vector architectures, GPUs, or other SIMD/vector processors, • Vector intrinsics, assembly programming, compiler intrinsics, or low-level code optimization, • DSP, image-processing, numerical-computing, or machine-learning kernel development, • Quantized inference, fixed-point arithmetic, INT8/INT16 computation, FP16/BF16, or other reduced-precision numerical formats, • DMA, scratchpad memory, cache hierarchies, memory bandwidth optimization, and multicore synchronization, • Embedded, bare-metal, real-time, or resource-constrained software development, • Multicore SoCs or heterogeneous compute architectures, • Open-source RISC-V platforms such as PULP or similar multicore/accelerator systems, • Machine-learning frameworks and model formats such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, TFLite, or ONNX, • Compiler and deployment technologies such as LLVM, MLIR, TVM, Deeploy, or related systems, • SDKs, runtime libraries, numerical libraries, developer tools, or reusable software APIs, • Hardware-software co-design, SoC development, FPGA prototyping, architectural simulation, or custom accelerator development, • Open-source software or research software development Why Join Mentium? At Mentium, you will work at the intersection of custom silicon, RISC-V, high-performance embedded software, and AI. You will work directly with the engineers designing the underlying hardware and play a central role in determining how developers and machine-learning workloads interact with our accelerator. Rather than simply programming an existing processor, you will have the opportunity to influence the hardware-software boundary: identifying architectural bottlenecks, developing optimized compute kernels, evaluating new programming approaches, and providing feedback that can shape future generations of the hardware. Benefits: • Competitive compensation packages, • Opportunity to work on diverse, cutting-edge AI projects across a range of industries., • 401(k), • Flexible PTO, • Full PPO medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage