(Senior) Applications Engineer

About Us

Axelera AI stands at the forefront of the semiconductor industry, driving advancements in artificial intelligence acceleration.  

In just over 2 years, we’ve assembled a team of over 140 brilliant engineers, developers, and business experts from across the globe. Guided by the brightest minds in the AI sphere and supported by renowned innovation leaders like IMEC, we've secured a total of US$50 million in funding.  

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

Position Overview

The Applications team develops the customer-facing components of Axelera AI’s Voyager SDK, including low-code model deployment, end-to-end pipeline development and application integration and analytics. Customers use these tools to quickly evaluate, prototype and build complete production AI solutions accelerated by Axelera AI devices. The Applications team develops cutting-edge development tools with simple APIs that ensure the solutions deployed by our customers reach the highest levels of performance and accuracy available in the market. 

We are seeking skilled and innovative software engineers to help us scale the product to support a wider range of models, pipelines and end-customer use cases. This is a challenging but rewarding role which can cover a variety of tasks such as compiling high-level graphical representations of ML-based pipelines, optimizing memory usage and synchronization on heterogeneous hardware targets and writing low-level implementations of computer vision operators for specialised processing elements. 

Key responsibilities:

Typical activities can vary depending on the candidate’s skillset but may include: 

• Studying research papers, open-source code repositories and product documentation to deploy new models using the Voyager SDK, and evaluating their performance and accuracy 

• Implementing image pre and post processing operators, collaborating with the compiler team to troubleshoot compilation issues, and writing decoders that transform inference tensors to metadata for ease of use by application developers  

• Integrating popular industry-standard model frameworks within the SDK to facilitate low-code and no-code deployment of many customer models and datasets 

• Defining metadata representations for common types of models (such as bounding boxes and keypoints), creating libraries for evaluating deployed model accuracy on Axelera AI hardware and creating libraries for visually rendering inference results 

• Optimizing end-to-end pipeline latency and throughput, root causing any bottlenecks arising on supported hardware platforms, and developing profiling tools to help customers more easily analyse and understand bottlenecks in their own pipelines 

• Writing and maintaining comprehensive product documentation and sharing knowledge with team members, promoting best practices and continuous improvement 

Qualifications:

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or equivalent work experience in the semiconductor and/or AI industry 

• Experience in AI application development using Python with ML libraries such as PyTorch and TensorFlow and familiar with techniques such as model quantization, compression and pruning 

• Experience in embedded software development using languages such as C/C++, CUDA and OpenCL targeting concurrent and heterogeneous systems (familiarity with different hardware micro-architectures, threading and cache coherency issues) 

• Experience with video-streaming frameworks such as GStreamer or computer vision libraries such as OpenCV a plus 

• Strong problem-solving skills and an ability to troubleshoot and debug complex multi-dimensional problems 

• Proficient Linux skills 

• Practical knowledge of agile development using tools such as Jira, Git and GitHub 

• Excellent people skills including oral and written communication and presentation skills 

• Self-motivated with the ability to thrive in a fast-paced collaborative startup environment 

Location

We offer a flexible working arrangement, with the option to work from or relocate near an Axelera AI office (Leuven in Belgium, Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Zurich in Switzerland, Milan in Italy or Bristol in the United Kingdom) or work fully remotely from any European country or Taiwan.

What we offer 

This is your chance to shape and be part of a dynamic, fast-growing, international organization. We offer an attractive compensation package, including a pension plan, extensive employee insurances and the option to get company shares.   

An open culture that supports creativity and continual innovation is awaiting you. Collaborative ownership and freedom with responsibility is characteristic for the way we act and work as a team. 

At Axelera AI, we wholeheartedly embrace equal opportunity and hold diversity in the highest regard. Our steadfast commitment is to cultivate a warm and inclusive environment that empowers and celebrates every member of our team. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds to join us in shaping the future of AI.