Trainium (NKI) Kernel Expert

Mercor
Software engineering
Remote
United States only
Contract

$70 to $90/hIndicative range provided by Mercor

Posted on August 25, 2026 · Applications until December 3, 2026

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Evaluates the quality, correctness, and optimization of Neuron Kernel Interface development tasks for AWS Trainium hardware. Requires two years of hands-on experience developing or optimizing NKI kernels and strong knowledge of memory-hierarchy management.

Description in English, as published by Mercor.

Evaluate the quality, correctness, and hardware-appropriateness of Neuron Kernel Interface (NKI) development tasks used to train and evaluate a frontier AI lab's models. You'll assess CUDA→NKI migration fidelity, Trainium-specific performance-optimization quality, and cross-platform numerical-correctness standards, and provide clear, rubric-based written feedback.

Basic Qualifications • 2+ years of hands-on experience developing or optimizing kernels using the Neuron Kernel Interface (NKI) targeting AWS Trainium/Inferentia2 hardware • Strong understanding of NKI-specific development patterns: tile-based computation, SBUF/PSUM/HBM memory-hierarchy management, partition-dimension constraints, and DMA orchestration • Demonstrated experience assessing CUDA→NKI migration quality • Familiarity with Trainium-specific performance profiling (NeuronCore pipeline utilization, tensor-engine throughput, memory-bandwidth bottlenecks) • Experience defining or evaluating cross-platform numerical-correctness standards (GPU vs Trainium accumulation order, rounding behavior, mixed-precision semantics)

Preferred Qualifications • Direct experience with AWS Neuron SDK, Neuron Compiler internals, or contributions to NKI kernel libraries • Prior CUDA or Triton kernel development • Familiarity with Trainium hardware specifications (NeuronCore-v2 architecture, on-chip SRAM topology, supported data types: FP32/BF16/FP8/INT8) • Experience benchmarking ML training workloads on Trn1/Trn2 instances

3 openings

Only: United States

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Mercor is a US marketplace hiring remote experts for AI and consulting projects, from law to engineering. The original posting is on their site.

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