GPU Kernel Expert
Quick facts
- Pay
- $70–90 / hour
- Type
- Contract
- Location
- Remote — United States
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Platform
- Mercor — 291 open jobs
- Typical pay at Mercor
- $42–180/hour · median $85 (135 jobs on our site)
- Apply
- Free to apply — never pay to get AI training work
Pay: $70 – $90/hour
Commitment: Hourly, ~40 h/week
Open to: USA
Field: Software Engineering
Evaluate the quality, correctness, and completeness of GPU/accelerator kernel development tasks used to train and evaluate a frontier AI lab's models. You'll assess numerical correctness, performance-benchmarking fairness, task scoping, and compilation/runtime validity across diverse kernel task types — and provide clear, rubric-based written feedback.
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 for kernels (absolute/relative/ULP tolerances, reference-implementation selection)
- Demonstrated experience with performance profiling and benchmarking (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, migration between hardware targets, 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
- Understanding of memory-hierarchy optimization (shared-memory tiling, register pressure, bank conflicts, coalescing patterns)
- Contributions to kernel libraries (cuBLAS, cuDNN, Triton community kernels, JAX/XLA custom calls)
About Mercor
Mercor is an AI-driven hiring marketplace that places professionals on contracts with leading AI labs. You apply once, complete a short AI interview, and are then matched to open projects.