Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Company:

Job Area:

Engineering Group, Engineering Group > Software Engineering

General Summary:

About the Role

Artificial Intelligence is changing the world for the benefit of human beings and societies. QUALCOMM, as the world’s leading mobile computing platform provider, is committed to enable the wide deployment of intelligent solutions on all possible devices – like smart phones, laptops, autonomous vehicles, robotics and IoT devices. Qualcomm is creating building blocks for the intelligent edge.

In this role you will develop tools to help developers optimize and deploy machine learning models on edge and mobile hardware. AIMET is Qualcomm's open-source library for state-of-the-art model quantization, and compression techniques. You will develop and support cutting-edge model optimization workflows — pushing the boundary of what's possible on resource-constrained hardware. Applications range from quantizing large language models (LLMs) and generative AI models to compressing latency-critical vision, audio, and multimodal networks for deployment on Qualcomm Snapdragon and other edge SoCs.

For this role we are seeking a talented and motivated Staff Software Engineer with expertise in the optimizing and deploying ML models – especially for edge devices.

What You'll Do

• Design, develop, and maintain quantization algorithms and compression pipelines within the AIMET framework (PTQ, QAT, mixed-precision, AdaScale etc.)
• Implement advanced quantization techniques including weight-only quantization, activation quantization, KV-cache quantization, and sub-4-bit quantization for LLMs and generative AI models
• Build tooling to analyze, profile, and debug model accuracy degradation caused by quantization
• Integrate AIMET workflows with popular ML frameworks — PyTorch and ONNX
• Develop APIs and developer-facing tooling to make AIMET accessible and easy to use for external customers and design partners
• Integrate AIMET to enable Quantization at large scale.
• Own end-to-end quantization and optimization of models, ensuring they meet accuracy, latency, and power targets on Qualcomm hardware
• Quantize and validate a broad range of model families — vision transformers, LLMs, diffusion models, speech, and multimodal architectures
• Develop and maintain automated quantization pipelines and evaluation harnesses to scale model onboarding

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 4+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.
OR
Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 3+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.
OR
PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 2+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 3+ years of industry experience in machine learning, deep learning, or AI infrastructure
• Strong proficiency in Python, with hands-on experience in PyTorch, ONNX and/or TensorFlow
• Solid understanding of neural network architectures — CNNs, Transformers, LLMs, diffusion models, multimodal models
• Experience with model quantization techniques — PTQ, QAT, weight-only quantization, mixed-precision, sub-4-bit methods
• Hands-on experience quantizing LLMs (GPT, LLaMA, Mistral, Falcon, or similar families) for inference optimization
• Familiarity with AIMET, GPTQ, AWQ, SmoothQuant, or similar quantization frameworks is a strong plus
• Experience working with ONNX, TFLite/LiteRT, or other model interchange formats
• Understanding of hardware constraints: memory bandwidth, compute precision (INT4/INT8/FP16/BF16), and NPU/DSP execution
• Experience collaborating across teams or BUs to drive technical alignment and model delivery
• Proficiency with git and software development best practices
• Strong written and verbal communication skills — ability to write clean APIs, documentation, and engage directly with external developers
• Experience with C++ for performance-critical components is a bonus
• Familiarity with ARM processors and mobile SoC architecture (Snapdragon) is a plus
• Experience with automated evaluation pipelines and model benchmarking at scale is a plus

Level of Responsibility

• Works independently with minimal supervision
• Provides technical guidance and mentorship to other team members
• Decision-making is significant and affects work beyond the immediate team
• Requires strong communication skills to convey complex quantization concepts to varied audiences — from hardware engineers and BU partners to external researchers and application developers
• Has meaningful influence on the AIMET product roadmap and cross-BU quantization strategy
• Tasks are open-ended; planning, prioritization, and problem-solving are core to the role

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 4+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.
OR
Master's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 3+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.
OR
PhD in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 2+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.

• 2+ years of work experience with Programming Language such as C, C++, Java, Python, etc.

Qualcomm expects its employees to abide by all applicable policies and procedures, including but not limited to security and other requirements regarding protection of Company confidential information and other confidential and/or proprietary information, to the extent those requirements are permissible under applicable law.

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If you would like more information about this role, please contact Qualcomm Careers.