Senior Performance Modeling Engineer

Flux Computing designs and manufactures optical processors to train and run inference on large AI models. Join us in London to be part of a highly motivated and skilled team that thrives on delivering impact and innovation at speed.

We’re searching for a Performance Modeling Engineer to create and own the analytical and simulation models that steer OTPU architecture and software evolution. You will build functional simulators as well as high-fidelity, cycle-accurate models of our optical compute system. This role is critical to explore “what-if” design spaces, and deliver insights that directly influence our software, hardware, and optical roadmaps. This role sits at the crossroads of hardware architecture, software tooling and machine-learning workload analysis, perfect for an engineer who loves data-driven decision-making and fast iteration.

Responsibilities

• Project Ownership: Own and deliver projects on your team's roadmap that unlock key high-impact technical and business milestones that drive the success of Flux.
• Collaboration: Work shoulder-to-shoulder with hardware, compiler and ML framework teams to ensure models reflect reality and reality meets performance goals.
• Functional Simulator: Design, build, and maintain a functional simulator of the OPTU subsystem and full pipeline.
• Performance Simulator: Design and maintain architectural & cycle-accurate models of the OPTU subsystems and pipeline. Identify throughput, latency and utilisation hot-spots; propose architectural, or scheduling fixes.
• Workload Analysis & Bottleneck Hunting: Instrument benchmarks (LLMs, diffusion, graph workloads) to collect detailed traces.
• Design-Space Exploration: Run massive parameter sweeps with your functional and to understand tradeoffs and guide the software, hardware, and optical teams. Package results into clear, quantitative analyses and design recommendations.
• Tooling & Automation: Develop Python/C++ tooling for trace parsing, statistical analysis and visualisation. Integrate models into CI so that every RTL commit gets a performance smoke test.

Skills & Experience

• 5+ years building performance or power models for CPUs, GPUs, ASICs, or accelerators.
• Strong coding ability in C++ and Python; experience with discrete-event or cycle-accurate simulators (e.g., gem5, SystemC, custom in-house).
• Solid grasp of computer-architecture fundamentals: memory systems, interconnects, queuing theory, Amdahl/Gustafson analysis.
• Familiarity with machine-learning workloads and common frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
• Comfort reading RTL or schematics and discussing micro-architectural trade-offs with hardware designers.
• Excellent data-visualisation and communication skills: able to turn millions of simulation samples into one decisive slide.
• Bachelor’s+ in EE, CS, Physics, Applied Maths or related; advanced degree preferred but not required.
• Personal or open-source projects in simulators, ML kernels, or performance analysis are a significant plus.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive salary and stock options in a rapidly growing AI company.
• Based in our new 5,000 sq. ft. office in the AI hub of Kings Cross, London.
• To foster collaboration in our high-growth environment, we require all employees to work from our London HQ and live within a 45-minute commute. We offer an extra £24,000/year incentive for those living within 20 minutes.
• Comprehensive healthcare insurance.
• 25 days PTO policy plus bank holidays.
• Private access to our in-house 3D printer.

If you are passionate about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in AI and thrive in a high-energy, fast-paced environment, we want to hear from you. Apply now to join Flux and be a key player in shaping the future of computing.