Principal Engineer, AI Systems and Performance Lab

Job overview

The Principal Engineer, AI Systems and Performance Lab role is onsite at the Milpitas office in Milpitas, CA. The posted salary range is $202,200–$343,700 per year. SanDisk develops flash and advanced memory technologies and products. The principal engineer establishes and leads an AI systems performance lab to characterize workloads and identify bottlenecks across software and heterogeneous hardware. The role turns rigorous performance analysis into recommendations that inform system architecture, platform strategy, and future hardware design.

What you'll do

• Establish the AI Lab's technical vision, charter, research agenda, success metrics, and execution model
• analyze AI training and inference workloads across models, frameworks, runtimes, and system stacks
• identify bottlenecks across compute, memory, interconnects, storage, power, and software
• develop benchmarking, profiling, and workload-characterization frameworks
• evaluate performance across hardware configurations
• partner with hardware, platform, architecture, software, product, and business teams
• mentor engineers and researchers
• communicate findings in technical reviews and executive briefings
• incorporate responsible AI, efficiency, sustainability, and scalability considerations.

What we're looking for

Skills & competencies

principal engineer

ai systems

performance lab

ai workloads

machine learning

benchmarking

profiling

system performance

technical leadership

onsite

milpitas ca

sandisk

$202,200-$343,700/year

Work arrangement

• Weekend coverage required

Benefits & perks

• Short-Term Incentive Plan
• possible Long-Term Incentive participation for eligible roles
• paid vacation and sick leave
• medical, dental, and vision insurance
• life, accident, and disability insurance
• flexible spending and health savings accounts
• employee assistance program
• tuition reimbursement
• transit
• employee stock purchase plan
• 401(k).

Why this role

Director-equivalent technical leadership with hands-on AI workload and system performance analysis, without reliance on large-team management.

About the employer

SanDisk is hiring for this role. Industry: Electronic Computer Manufacturing. Sector: 33.