# Kernel Engineer (Custom Silicon), Hardware at River AI

- Company: River AI
- What the company does: Develop frontier language models and agents. Training, reinforcement learning, and inference in one system, on River Cloud or your own GPU cluster. Backed by General Catalyst.
- Company website: https://river.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: Palo Alto, CA; Austin, TX
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $200K to $420K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-06-28
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/riverai/jobs/4300352009
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/river-ai-kernel-engineer-custom-silicon-hardware/

## About the role

We are looking for exceptional performance and kernel generation engineers to build the foundational compute engine for our high-performance custom silicon. In this role, you will design and implement robust kernel generators that programmatically emit optimized low-level assembly code for our greenfield hardware architecture.

## What they're looking for

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, and 5+ years of practical industry experience in low-level performance programming
- Deep understanding of hardware programming models (e.g., CUDA, Triton, CUTLASS, or custom accelerator assembly) and a proven track record of shipping highly optimized kernels
- Advanced knowledge of Computer Architecture, including vector units, execution pipelines, register files, and complex memory hierarchies (caches, SRAM, HBM/DRAM)
- Proficiency in modern C++ for building robust, scalable meta-programming and code-generation frameworks
- Strong mathematical foundation in linear algebra operations and deep learning primitives
- A highly collaborative mindset to push boundaries and co-design effectively with hardware and compiler teams

Tags: Personal AI Hardware