Senior Staff Machine Learning Performance Engineer

The role

You will own the training speed of physical AI foundation models for autonomous driving and robotics, across thousands of accelerators. You will work with modeling teams on their hardest bottlenecks and set the performance direction for them.

What you will do

• Own step time, scaling efficiency and long-run stability for foundation-model training across thousands of accelerators.
• Work directly with modeling, infrastructure, simulation, data-mining and robotics teams on their hardest bottlenecks.
• Set the performance direction those teams build against.
• Turn one-off performance wins into modular components that become defaults across models and workloads.
• Extend performance tooling and metric coverage across the stack with low instrumentation overhead.
• Build agents that reproduce jobs, verify numerical parity and separate real regressions from run-to-run noise.

Required qualifications

• Master's or PhD in CS, CE or EE, or equivalent practical experience, with 8+ years of industry experience, most of it in performance engineering.
• Hands-on experience optimizing GPU training or inference workloads in production, at multi-node scale.
• A track record of diagnosing production performance problems and landing verified fixes, often in systems owned by other teams.
• In-depth understanding of computer architecture and high-performance computing.
• Strong C++ and Python, with a solid command of data structures and algorithms.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience writing and tuning CUDA or Triton kernels.
• Fluent in PyTorch, with insight into graph breaks, host-side overhead, synchronization points and memory layout.
• Training at the scale of thousands of accelerators, including multi-node failure modes.
• Building profiling, tracing or benchmarking infrastructure used by other teams, such as CUPTI or Perfetto.
• Using LLM agents to automate parts of an engineering workflow.
• Experience in autonomous driving, robotics or another domain with hard latency, power and memory constraints.
• Publications or open-source contributions in ML systems or performance.

Benefits

• A fun, supportive and engaging environment.
• Infrastructure and computational resources to support your work.
• Opportunity to work on cutting edge technologies with top talent in the field.
• Opportunity to make a significant impact on the transportation revolution through advancing autonomous driving.
• Competitive compensation package.
• Snacks, lunches, dinners, and fun activities.

Before you apply

• The posting is an Equal Opportunity Employer statement; no citizenship, clearance or visa sponsorship rules are stated.

About the company

XPENG is a smart technology company integrating AI and autonomous driving into electric vehicles, eVTOL aircraft and robotics. It focuses on intelligent mobility and cutting-edge R&D in AI, machine learning and smart connectivity.