# Performance Engineer, 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: 2026-05-15
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/riverai/jobs/4250020009
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/river-ai-performance-engineer-hardware/

## About the role

We are seeking exceptional hardware performance engineers to architect, model, and correlate high-performance custom silicon. You will develop high-fidelity simulators to predict how our AI accelerator architecture and SoC system will handle real-world AI models. You will take ownership of performance models, ISA and kernel optimization, and FPGA emulators for software development. You will be collaborating both up and down the stack with compiler, IR, and software teams, as well as with RTL design engineers.

## What they're looking for

- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering or Computer Science, and 5+ years practical industry experience working with advanced process nodes (7nm or below)
- Expert proficiency in C/C++ or event-driven simulation environments like SystemC
- Hands-on experience with how compilers transform code (LLVM/GCC/XLA) and how high-performance kernels (CUDA/Triton) interact with the underlying ISA
- Expert knowledge in Computer Architecture of at least one style of chip, including SoCs, CPUs, GPUs, or AI accelerators
- Experience with profiling hardware with performance counters, hardware profilers, and trace analysis tools to dissect application behavior
- A highly collaborative mindset to push boundaries and co-design effectively with other engineers

Tags: Personal AI Hardware