About the job
About OLIX
At OLIX, we are at the forefront of a technological revolution. The demand for AI is surging faster than any previous technology, leading to a significant gap in infrastructure. Conventional hardware designs have reached their limits, and the industry is in desperate need of innovation. We are pioneering a new era with our Optical Tensor Processing Unit (OTPU), which promises unparalleled performance and energy efficiency that current chips cannot match.
The Role
We are looking for a Senior Performance Modelling Engineer to take ownership of analytical and simulation models that guide the architecture and software development of our OTPU. Your expertise will be vital in creating functional simulators and high-fidelity, cycle-accurate models of our optical computing system. This position is essential for exploring design possibilities and delivering insights that will shape our software, hardware, and optical strategies. Ideal candidates will thrive in a dynamic environment at the intersection of hardware architecture, software tools, and machine-learning workload analysis, with a passion for data-driven decisions and rapid prototyping.
Responsibilities
Project Ownership: Lead and execute projects within your team's roadmap that unlock critical technical and business milestones essential for OLIX's success.
Collaboration: Partner closely with hardware, compiler, and ML framework teams to ensure that models accurately represent reality and meet performance targets.
Functional Simulator: Design, develop, and maintain a functional simulator for the OPTU subsystem and its complete pipeline.
Performance Simulator: Create and maintain architectural and cycle-accurate models of the OPTU subsystems and pipeline, identifying key throughput, latency, and utilization bottlenecks to propose architectural or scheduling solutions.
Workload Analysis & Bottleneck Hunting: Use benchmarks (including LLMs, diffusion, and graph workloads) to gather detailed traces.
Design-Space Exploration: Conduct extensive parameter sweeps using your functional models to analyze trade-offs and steer the software, hardware, and optical teams, presenting results in clear, quantitative analyses and design recommendations.

