Staff AI Inference and Acceleration Engineer

Who you are

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field — or equivalent industry experience
• At least 8 years of industry experience in hardware acceleration, ML systems, or compute architecture
• Deep understanding of AI/ML inference — model formats (ONNX, TFLite, etc.), inference runtimes, and deployment pipelines
• Hands-on experience optimizing models for edge or embedded hardware using quantization, pruning, and operator-level tuning
• Strong understanding of computer architecture — memory hierarchies, data movement, and heterogeneous compute
• Experience profiling and benchmarking inference workloads across CPU, GPU, NPU, DSP
• Familiarity with low-level toolchains and compilation frameworks (e.g. TVM, MLIR, TensorRT, Torch, SNPE/QNN, JAX, CUDA, ROCm)
• Solid software engineering skills in C++ and Python
• Strong cross-functional communication skills — able to work effectively across hardware, software, and AI/ML teams
• Knowledge of real-time operating constraints and their impact on inference scheduling
• Track record of co-designing model architectures with ML teams to meet hardware constraints

What the job involves

• We are looking for a Staff AI Inference & Acceleration Engineer to join the Platform Software team and own the on-board inference architecture for Figure’s humanoid robots
• You will be the technical authority on how AI workloads are mapped, optimized, and executed across the robot’s compute hardware — driving down power consumption and cost while meeting the strict latency and reliability demands of a real-time autonomous system
• Own the on-board inference architecture — mapping models to available accelerators (NPU, GPU, DSP, CPU) based on latency, power, and memory budgets
• Partition inference workloads across heterogeneous compute resources, balancing real-time performance with power and thermal constraints
• Define and maintain a system-level compute budget across all inference tasks running on the robot
• Evaluate next-generation acceleration hardware and contribute to the definition of future compute platform requirements
• Optimize inference toolchains end-to-end — from model export through runtime execution — for target hardware
• Apply quantization (INT8, INT4, mixed-precision), pruning, operator fusion, and other compression techniques to reduce compute, memory, and power footprint
• Profile inference pipelines to identify and eliminate bottlenecks in latency, memory bandwidth, and power consumption
• Optimize kernel scheduling, memory layout, and data movement across the compute hierarchy
• Partner closely with the AI/ML team to define model architecture constraints that are hardware-friendly from the outset
• Work with the Platform Software team on runtime integration, scheduling, and power management
• Engage with silicon vendors and research teams to track the accelerator landscape and influence hardware roadmaps