GPU Kernel Expert at Mercor

GPU Kernel Expert | $70–90/hr | Remote (US)

Join a cutting-edge AI evaluation project where your deep expertise in GPU and accelerator kernel development will directly shape the quality of frontier AI model training. You'll assess and provide rubric-based feedback on kernel development tasks — evaluating correctness, performance, and validity across a wide range of kernel types.

What You'll Do

• Evaluate the quality, correctness, and completeness of GPU/accelerator kernel development tasks used to train and assess frontier AI models
• Assess numerical correctness, performance-benchmarking fairness, task scoping, and compilation/runtime validity
• Provide clear, structured written feedback based on defined rubrics across diverse kernel task types

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience developing, optimizing, or verifying GPU/accelerator kernels in at least two of: CUDA, Triton, NKI, or Pallas (JAX)
• Strong understanding of numerical-correctness criteria (absolute/relative/ULP tolerances, reference-implementation selection)
• Demonstrated experience with performance profiling and benchmarking tools such as Nsight, ncu, roofline analysis, or framework-native profilers
• Familiarity with common compilation and runtime failure modes (driver mismatches, OOM, launch-configuration errors, shape/stride mismatches, autotuning failures)
• Experience with at least three kernel task types: generation from specification, translation/lowering across frameworks, hardware migration, debugging, performance optimization, or operator fusion

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience across both NVIDIA GPU (CUDA/Triton) and custom-accelerator (NKI/Pallas/TPU) ecosystems
• Background in compiler engineering, MLIR, or intermediate-representation lowering
• Deep understanding of memory-hierarchy optimization (shared-memory tiling, register pressure, bank conflicts, coalescing patterns)
• Contributions to kernel libraries such as cuBLAS, cuDNN, Triton community kernels, or JAX/XLA custom calls

This is a contractor role offering flexible, hourly engagement for experienced GPU engineers looking to contribute to impactful AI development work.