Performance Engineer (Junior) AI Infrastructure Cambridge (Hybrid)

Performance Engineer (Junior) | AI Infrastructure | Cambridge (Hybrid) | up to £70k Most engineers find out whether a change works after it ships. This role is about knowing before anyone spends a penny on new hardware, building the models that predict itMy client is a Cambridge-based non-profit built on a fairly simple premise: different bits of the AI world keep solving the same infrastructure problems separately, and that's wasteful. So they've built a shared space where startups, big enterprises, government bodies and university researchers can pool that hard technical work instead. Early days as an organisation, but real backing and real momentum behind it.
This particular seat is for an early career professional. We're after someone academically exceptional, ideally with a PhD, who's ready to get stuck into real technical work quickly rather than needing a long runway to get there.
Day to day
You'd work alongside senior engineers on the team, pulling real metrics off live training and inference jobs and turning them into models and calculators that answer actual questions, whether an optimisation is worth shipping, whether a different setup would run cheaper. Real ownership early, with senior support close by.

What you'll bring

A postgraduate research background, ideally a PhD in computer science, mathematics, physics or a closely related field, strongly preferred, exceptional recent master's graduates with directly relevant coursework will also be considered
A genuine, demonstrated grasp of computer architecture fundamentals and how LLMs and deep learning models actually run on hardware, training versus inference, matrix multiplication, KV-caching
Real experience building performance models or forecasting tools, Python or spreadsheet-based, from research, a thesis, a placement, or serious personal projects
Hands-on work with GPU or accelerator code, CUDA or similar
Familiarity with profiling tools (Nsight, PyTorch Profiler) and ideally some exposure to monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana)
Strong Python for data work, Pandas and NumPy, genuine scripting abilityNice to have: exposure to inference serving frameworks like vLLM, published research, or open source contributions in this space.

Why look twice at this one
An early route into industry for someone whose academic record speaks for itself, working directly with senior engineers on problems with real backing behind them. Pension, hybrid from a Cambridge office, and exposure to people across the wider AI and academic scene most people this early in their career don't get
Only candidates based in UK and eligible to work in UK are allowed