Senior Applications Engineer - Embedded AI (Italy based)

About Us

Axelera AI is not your regular deep-tech startup. We are creating the next-generation AI platform to support anyone who wants to help advancing humanity and improve the world around us.

In just three years, we have raised a total of $120 million and have built a world-class team of 180+ employees (including 55+ PhDs with more than 40,000 citations), both remotely from 11 different countries and with offices in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, the UK, headquartered at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

We have also launched our Metis™ AI Platform, which achieves a 3-5x increase in efficiency and performance, and have visibility into a strong business pipeline exceeding $100 million.

Our unwavering commitment to innovation has firmly established us as a global industry pioneer. 

Are you up for the challenge?

Position Overview

The Applications team develops the customer-facing components of Axelera AI’s Voyager SDK, including low-code model deployment, end-to-end pipeline development and application integration and analytics. Customers use these tools to quickly evaluate, prototype and build complete production AI solutions accelerated by Axelera AI devices. The Applications team develops cutting-edge development tools with simple APIs that ensure the solutions deployed by our customers reach the highest levels of performance and accuracy available in the market. 

We are seeking skilled and innovative software engineers to help us scale the product to support a wider range of models, pipelines and end-customer use cases. This is a challenging but rewarding role which can cover a variety of tasks such as compiling high-level graphical representations of ML-based pipelines, optimizing memory usage and synchronization on heterogeneous hardware targets and writing low-level implementations of computer vision operators for specialised processing elements. 

Key responsibilities:

Typical activities can vary depending on the candidate’s skillset but may include: 

• Studying research papers, open-source code repositories and product documentation to deploy new models using the Voyager SDK, and evaluating their performance and accuracy 

• Implementing image pre and post processing operators, collaborating with the compiler team to troubleshoot compilation issues, and writing decoders that transform inference tensors to metadata for ease of use by application developers  

• Integrating popular industry-standard model frameworks within the SDK to facilitate low-code and no-code deployment of many customer models and datasets 

• Defining metadata representations for common types of models (such as bounding boxes and keypoints), creating libraries for evaluating deployed model accuracy on Axelera AI hardware and creating libraries for visually rendering inference results 

• Optimizing end-to-end pipeline latency and throughput, root causing any bottlenecks arising on supported hardware platforms, and developing profiling tools to help customers more easily analyse and understand bottlenecks in their own pipelines 

• Writing and maintaining comprehensive product documentation and sharing knowledge with team members, promoting best practices and continuous improvement 

Qualifications:

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or equivalent work experience in the semiconductor and/or AI industry

• Proven hands-on experience with edge deployment frameworks such as OpenVINO or TensorRT

• Familiarity with model optimisation techniques such as quantization, compression and pruning a plus

• Proficiency in AI application development using Python, with extensive experience in ML libraries such as PyTorch and TensorFlow

• Demonstrated ability to build and deploy end-to-end pipelines with quantized models

• Experience in training models using transfer learning to leverage pre-trained models for new tasks

• Experience with MLIR and ONNXRuntime a plus

• Strong problem-solving skills and an ability to troubleshoot and debug complex multi-dimensional problems

• Proficient Linux skills

• Practical knowledge of agile development using tools such as Jira, Git and GitHub

• Self-motivated with the ability to thrive in a fast-paced collaborative startup environment 

Location

This position is based Italy (in hybrid or remote set up). We also support relocation to Bologna, Florence or Milan for talent based abroad and interested in this role.

What we offer 

This is your chance to shape and be part of a dynamic, fast-growing, international organization. We offer an attractive compensation package, including a pension plan, extensive employee insurances and the option to get company shares.   

An open culture that supports creativity and continual innovation is awaiting you. Collaborative ownership and freedom with responsibility is characteristic for the way we act and work as a team. 

At Axelera AI, we wholeheartedly embrace equal opportunity and hold diversity in the highest regard. Our steadfast commitment is to cultivate a warm and inclusive environment that empowers and celebrates every member of our team. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds to join us in shaping the future of AI.