Senior Performance Engineer

Senior Performance Engineer (RISC-V, AI & HPC)

Location: Limerick, Ireland (Hybrid / Flexible)

Employment Type: Permanent, Full-time

Company Type: High-growth deep-tech startup

Role Overview

A fast-growing deep-tech startup based in Limerick is seeking a Senior / Principal Performance Engineer to work on next-generation RISC-V silicon. This role focuses on optimising AI, HPC, and system-level workloads across both pre-silicon and silicon environments.

This is a highly technical, hands-on position, ideal for engineers who enjoy working close to the hardware and collaborating across software, firmware, compiler, and hardware teams.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Contributions

Optimise AI, HPC, and system workloads for custom RISC-V architectures, including vector extensions

Characterise workloads, identify performance bottlenecks, and drive implementation of solutions

Analyse application behaviour across the full system stack (CPU, memory, storage, power)

Profile and optimise software on pre-silicon platforms (simulators, emulators, FPGAs) and on real silicon

Perform root-cause analysis and resolve complex performance issues

Optimise HPC and AI libraries, runtimes, and benchmarks

Contribute to operating-system-level instrumentation for performance and power

Integrate performance benchmarking into CI/CD pipelines

Present findings to senior technical stakeholders and, where appropriate, at industry conferences

Contribute to upstream open-source projects

Collaboration & Influence

Work closely with hardware teams, influencing hardware/software co-design decisions

Collaborate with compiler, firmware, OS, AI stack, and middleware teams

Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and bug triaging

Contribute to shared team responsibilities such as documentation, CI issue triage, and technical rotations

Required Qualifications & Experience

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field

3–5+ years’ experience in performance engineering, systems engineering, HPC, or low-level software development

Strong understanding of computer architecture (CPU, cache, memory hierarchy, interconnects)

Proven experience with performance optimisation and profiling

Strong programming skills in C/C++ (Rust is a plus)

Experience working with assembly language (any architecture)

Solid understanding of Linux, operating systems, and system-level software

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

Desirable / Nice-to-Have Experience

RISC-V development, particularly at the assembly level

AI or HPC performance optimisation

Familiarity with performance tools (Linux perf, VTune, flamegraphs, lmbench, sysbench, etc.)

Experience with HPC and AI benchmarks (SPEC CPU, Linpack, MLPerf, Graph500, etc.)

Experience with simulators and emulators (QEMU, Gem5, Spike)

Bare-metal or embedded systems development

Fortran and/or statistical analysis

Containerised environments (Docker, Kubernetes)

Hypervisors (KVM, Xen)

Open-source software development

Soft Skills & Mindset

Strong team player with excellent communication skills

Curious and motivated to learn new technologies and architectures

Comfortable collaborating across teams and disciplines

Proactive, self-driven, and solution-focused

Thrives in a fast-paced startup environment