Role brief
Job description
Current Mercor opportunity: GPU Kernel Expert appeared in the live Mercor Explore catalog and was rechecked from the current role page on 2026-09-18.
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)
Current source check: Active on Mercor as of 2026-09-18. Confirm pay, hours, location eligibility, and screening steps in Mercor’s application flow.
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