MTS - Research (Kernels & Hardware RL)

Required

• We are looking for individuals who demonstrate a rare combination of technical depth, research intuition, and high agency.
• Technical Foundation: A Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in CS, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or demonstrated proof of work through significant open-source contributions or industry experience.
• Engineering Rigor: Strong C/C++ and CUDA or a comparable kernel language, alongside production-quality Python. You have built and profiled kernels and understand memory hierarchy, data movement, parallelism, occupancy, and numerical correctness.
• ML Fluency: Hands-on experience with LLMs and a principled understanding of how they are evaluated and optimized. You can translate a systems problem into an executable task with clear feedback.
• Empirical Mindset: Experience conducting reproducible performance experiments, inspecting profiler results, and distinguishing real improvements from measurement noise or benchmark shortcuts.
• What will make you stand out
• Research Taste: You have a strong intuition for identifying what matters in complex problem spaces. You can balance deep research exploration with the pragmatism needed to ship a product.
• Impact-Driven Agency: You care about outcomes, not just activity. You don't wait for a ticket; you identify gaps in the system, build the solution, and ensure it moves real-world metrics for frontier AI labs.
• Domain Expertise: Depth in Triton, CUTLASS, LLVM/MLIR, GPU architectures, vector ISAs, FPGA/HLS, RTL/HDL, EDA tools, or architecture simulators. Experience building RL environments, agent harnesses, or robust evaluation infrastructure.
• Proven Track Record: A history of shipping high-performance kernels, compiler or hardware tooling, influential systems or ML research, or high-impact open-source projects.
• Post-Training Experience: Experience fine-tuning or evaluating large-scale models to deliver "frontier performance" on open-source benchmarks.
• Why Join Collinear