Senior AI Application Engineer - LLM & VLM Enablement
Job description
Senior AI Application Engineer in the Model Enablement team (Application Software), owning LLM and VLM support on Metis and Europa AIPUs, from studying new models to shipping them in the Voyager SDK. The role combines LLM/VLM knowledge with solid software engineering, using AI coding agents in daily work.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Remote · UK, Belgium, Italy
What you'll do
- Study new LLM and VLM families and architectures (for example mixture-of-experts, small VLMs, new attention and decoding schemes); prototype and profile them on Metis and Europa, and decide how they should run on our hardware
- Turn your results and our ML research group's results into supported Voyager SDK features, with stable APIs, tests, documentation and release gates
- For each LLM/VLM building block, own the PyTorch reference with quantization baked in, the weight mapping, and one contract that lists every input, output, weight and persistent state (such as a paged KV cache), and hand that contract to the compiler team
- Bring LLM and VLM serving into the Voyager SDK pipeline builder: prefill and decode, KV-cache management, streaming text output and multimodal inputs
- With the regression and quantization owners, measure accuracy against the floating-point reference, and close or explain each gap
- Extend the model enablement platform for LLM and VLM bring-up: environments with access to the compiler, runtime and real hardware (for example through MCP tools), closed-loop runs that apply a change, measure accuracy and speed against the reference and repeat, and evaluations that score each run
- Recommend what the Voyager SDK needs for GenAI, agents and speech on edge devices, and which model zoo demos show it best
What we're looking for
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years on ML inference, ML systems or ML tooling
- Solid understanding of transformer inference: attention variants, KV caching, prefill versus decode, sampling, tokenization, and how a VLM joins a vision encoder to a language model
- Working knowledge of LLM quantization (weight-only and weight-activation schemes, calibration, outlier handling), and the ability to tell a quantization loss from an implementation bug
- Strong Python and PyTorch, and experience shipping production-quality software
- Daily use of AI coding agents on real codebases, with good judgment about when to verify or reject their output
- Ability to turn research code and hardware constraints into a practical design
Nice to have
- Experience with inference engines or serving stacks (for example llama.cpp, vLLM, ONNX Runtime GenAI, ExecuTorch)
- Experience with kernel development or a tensor compiler (for example Triton, TVM or MLIR), or with profiling models on accelerator hardware
- Experience with speech (ASR, TTS) or agentic applications on embedded devices
- Experience building evaluation or testing harnesses for ML systems or AI agents, or tool-calling agents (for example MCP servers)
Your team
Model Enablement team (Application Software)
Team that owns LLM and VLM support on Metis and Europa AIPUs and ships models in the Voyager SDK; uses AI coding agents in daily work.
Benefits
- Flexible working arrangement
- Work fully remotely from any European country (incl. the UK) you are already in
- Relocate with us and work from Italy (Florence or Milan) or the Netherlands (Amsterdam or Eindhoven)
- Chance to shape and be part of a dynamic, fast-growing, international organization
Apply
Direct apply at Axelera AI
Opens the job posting at Axelera AI
About Axelera AI
Creating the next-generation AI platform
Deep-tech company that launched the Metis™ AI Platform, which achieves a 3-5x increase in efficiency and performance, with visibility into a strong business pipeline exceeding $100 million.
Mission
Creating the next-generation AI platform to support anyone who wants to help advancing humanity and improve the world around us.
Key facts
- AI hardware and software
- Launched the Metis™ AI Platform, which achieves a 3-5x increase in efficiency and performance
- Visibility into a strong business pipeline exceeding $100 million
- Global industry pioneer