Level

Intel

AI Infrastructure Engineer

Intel is hiring an AI Infrastructure Engineer in Santa Clara, United States. It pays $171k-$315k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.

AI in this role

llamavllmpytorch
Job Details:

Job Description: 

We are looking for a performance-obsessed AI Infrastructure Engineer to push LLM inference to its absolute limits on Intel's next-generation GPU architectures.
In this role, you will dive deep into the inference stack and redefine peak performance. You will work end-to-end across the stack: profiling bottlenecks, writing custom GPU kernels, and upstreaming your optimizations directly into industry-standard serving frameworks like vLLM and SGLang. Your optimizations will be instrumental in unlocking the full potential of Intel hardware for state-of-the-art generative AI workloads.

What You Will Do
• Drive Inference Performance: Own the end-to-end optimization pipeline for running state-of-the-art LLMs on Intel GPUs.
• Deep Stack Optimization: Profile, diagnose, and resolve cross-stack performance bottlenecks.
• Kernel Development and Integration: Design, write, and optimize custom high-performance kernels for critical attention mechanisms, MoE, quantization, and operator fusions.
• Open Source Leadership: Upstream your architectural improvements and hardware backends directly into open-source repositories like vLLM, SGLang, and PyTorch, acting as a bridge between the hardware teams and the open-source community.
• Shape the Hardware Roadmap: Apply roofline analysis and systematic profiling to decompose bottlenecks. You will partner with our architecture and compiler teams to shape future GPU roadmaps based on real-world GenAI workload data.

• Show passion about AI infrastructure and performance optimization.

Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, or related field and 4+ years experience, Masters Degree and 3+ years, OR PhD.
• 3+ years of relevant software engineering experience in GPU computing, AI systems, or high-performance computing (HPC).
• Proficiency in modern C++ and Python. You are comfortable reading and modifying complex systems-level code.

Preferred Qualifications
• Understanding of CPU/GPU architecture.
• Understanding of modern LLM architectures and inference paradigms: attention mechanisms, KV caching, continuous batching, speculative decoding, and prefill-decode disaggregation.
• Prior open-source contributions to inference engines (vLLM, SGLang, PyTorch, llama.cpp).
• Hands-on experience writing and optimizing custom GPU kernels using Triton, SYCL, CUDA/CUTLASS, or other DSLs.
• Experience with scale-out inference orchestration across multi-node topologies.
• You leverage AI coding agents daily to accelerate your own workflow and benchmark generation.

Your expertise will play a vital role in advancing Intel's AI technology. We invite you to bring your skills, experience, and passion for AI to make an impact-apply today.

          

Job Type:

Experienced Hire

Shift:

Shift 1 (United States of America)

Primary Location: 

US, California, Santa Clara

Additional Locations:

US, California, Folsom, US, Oregon, Hillsboro, US, Texas, Austin

Posting Statement:

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, religious creed, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military and veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, gender, gender expression, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by local law, regulation, or ordinance.

Position of Trust

N/A

Benefits

We offer a total compensation package that ranks among the best in the industry. It consists of competitive pay, stock bonuses, and benefit programs which include health, retirement, and vacation. Find out more about the benefits of working at Intel.

 

 

Annual Salary Range for jobs which could be performed in the US: $170,500.00-315,490.00 USD

 

 

The range displayed on this job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target compensation for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific compensation range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

 

 

Work Model for this Role

This role will be eligible for our hybrid work model which allows employees to split their time between working on-site at their assigned Intel site and off-site. * Job posting details (such as work model, location or time type) are subject to change.

*

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Intel is committed to Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) compliance and ethical hiring practices. We do not charge any fees during our hiring process. Candidates should never be required to pay recruitment fees, medical examination fees, or any other charges as a condition of employment. If you are asked to pay any fees during our hiring process, please report this immediately to your recruiter.

How we rate this

AI Infrastructure Engineer at Intel rates 92 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.

Prepare for this job

A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

LlamavLLMPyTorch

Questions you could be asked

  1. What's a project where you used Llama hands-on?
  2. Walk me through how you've used vLLM in your day-to-day work.
  3. What are the limits of PyTorch that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
  4. How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
  5. Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Llama, vLLM, and PyTorch. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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