---
title: 'Performance Engineer, Kernels at Sarvam'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/performance-engineer-kernels-sarvam-bengaluru-zv8px6g77x3r'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Performance Engineer, Kernels at Sarvam

- **Company:** [Sarvam](https://feeny.ai/companies/sarvam)
- **Location:** Bengaluru, India
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sarvam/72783205-b637-4431-9a0e-676a8223b063

## Job description

## PERFORMANCE ENGINEER, KERNELS

Part of Sarvam's Performance Engineering team. We are hiring two specialized performance roles - Kernels (this posting) and Inference (companion posting). They are a vertical stack: the kernels team authors the µs-level GPU code, and the inference team integrates it into a running serving stack and owns the system-level numbers. If your depth genuinely spans both, apply to either and tell us - but most candidates are strongest in one, and we hire for that depth.

Location: [Bengaluru / Chennai / Hybrid / On-site] · Team: Performance Engineering · Level: Senior

## ABOUT THE TEAM

Sarvam serves multiple model families - small and large LLMs, Mixture-of-Experts, streaming Indic ASR, and multimodal - across a multi-node, multi-tenant fleet on H100 / H200 / B200. The Performance Engineering team owns the numbers the rest of the company plans against: how fast we serve, how much it costs, and how much we get out of every GPU. This team works at the intersection of the serving runtime, the kernel layer, and the SRE org that keeps the fleet alive.

## ABOUT THE ROLE

You will own the kernel layer. Where stock libraries - cuBLAS, cuDNN, FlashAttention, out-of-the-box Triton - leave performance on the table, you will author the custom CUDA, DSL-based, and PTX kernels that close the gap.

This is a hard, narrow, high-leverage role. We hire engineers who have shipped kernels that beat published baselines on real workloads, not engineers who have used kernels. When your code lands, production p99 moves, and you own the explanation of why.

## WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- 5+ years in ML systems, with 2+ years authoring production CUDA kernels. You have a kernel in production that beat the prior baseline by a measurable margin.
- CUDA at kernel-authoring level: thread-block sizing, shared-memory layout, warp primitives, async copies (cp.async, TMA), and MMA selection.
- CUTLASS / CuTe DSL at a modify-and-extend level, with comfort in the layout algebra.
- PTX at a debug-and-modify level - you have inserted hand-written PTX where the compiler missed.
- Nsight Compute and Systems fluency: you read a roofline plot and propose the fix.
- Attention kernels: you have authored or modified at least one (FlashAttention-family, paged, MLA, sliding-window, or sparse).
- Multi-architecture awareness: what changes from Hopper to Blackwell (TMA, WGMMA, tcgen05).

## STRONG PLUSES

- Communication kernels - NCCL / NVSHMEM authoring, custom collectives, expert-parallel dispatch (DeepEP-style), AFD bipartite comms (StepMesh-style), KV transfer (DualPath / Mooncake). Strongly desired; dedicated comms-specialist headcount is expected later.
- Open-source kernel contributions - FlashAttention, CUTLASS examples, vLLM / SGLang kernels, DeepEP, Mooncake, or non-trivial Triton work. For this role, the GitHub filter is the highest-yield signal.
- tcgen05, TMA, CTA-cluster launch and distributed shared memory, async pipelining, and the FP4/microscaling paths
- Grace-side host-path optimization on GH200 / GB200.

## About Sarvam

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sarvam is building India's full-stack sovereign AI platform, delivering state-of-the-art models and enterprise-grade applications for Indic languages.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A – $41M raised)
- **Headquarters**: Bengaluru, India
- **Founded**: August 2023
- **Founders**: Dr. Vivek Raghavan, Dr. Pratyush Kumar

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Artificial Intelligence / Generative AI
- Target customers: Enterprises, Government, Developers (B2B, B2G)
- Mission: Make AI widely accessible to everyone in India by building foundational components that reflect how the country thinks, speaks, reasons, and solves problems.

## Products & Services
- **Sarvam Cloud**: Fully managed, automatically scaling API platform for Indic AI capabilities.
- **Speech to Text (Saaras)**: High‑accuracy ASR across 12 Indic languages.
- **Text to Speech (Bulbul)**: Natural voices across 11 Indic languages.
- **Translation**: State‑of‑the‑art translation across 23 languages.
- **Document Digitisation (Akshar)**: Convert PDFs and images into structured data.
- **Vision Models**: Image understanding and processing.
- **Samvaad**: Conversational AI studio for building voice agents.
- **Arya**: AI‑for‑work platform with forward‑deployed engineers for custom agent design and integration.
- **Deployment Options**: Private cloud, on‑premise, hybrid, or air‑gapped environments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $41M (from Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners
- **Growth Signals**: 62 open positions across engineering, models, product, sales, and more; case studies with large‑scale deployments (50,000+ farmer feedback calls, millions of policy calls); SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, DPDP compliant.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Sovereign AI**: All technology developed and operated entirely in India, with full data control and compliance with Indian data protection laws.
- **Full‑stack platform**: From foundational models to enterprise agents, everything built in‑house.
- **Forward‑deployed engineering**: Dedicated engineers embedded with customer teams to ensure successful delivery.
- **Population‑scale impact**: Proven ability to serve millions of users in Indic languages across government and BFSI.
- **Deployment flexibility**: Can run on any infrastructure, including air‑gapped for regulated industries.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue building state‑of‑the‑art models and tools for Indic languages.
- Expand enterprise and government adoption of conversational AI agents.
- Nurture the Indian AI ecosystem by open‑sourcing models and tools.
- Scale team rapidly (62 open roles) to support growing customer demand.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission‑driven opportunity**: Shape AI that serves India’s linguistic and cultural diversity.
- **On‑site first**: All roles are based in Bengaluru (Delhi also available), fostering deep collaboration.
- **Cutting‑edge work**: Foundational model research, ML infrastructure, full‑stack product engineering.
- **High‑impact culture**: Teams work directly with customers via forward‑deployed engineers, seeing immediate real‑world use.
- **Backed by top investors**: Financial stability and growth runway from Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures.

## Sources
1. [sarvam.ai](https://www.sarvam.ai/)
2. [sarvam.ai/about-us](https://www.sarvam.ai/about-us)
3. [sarvam.ai/careers](https://www.sarvam.ai/careers)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/sarvam](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sarvam)
5. [linkedin.com/company/sarvam-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sarvam-ai)

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