Senior Performance Engineer | AI Infrastructure | Cambridge (Hybrid) |

Senior Performance Engineer | AI Infrastructure | Cambridge (Hybrid) | £90k–£120k
Nobody quite knows where their compute budget is actually going until someone builds the model that tells them. That's this role.
My client is a Cambridge-based non-profit that exists to stop different parts of the AI world quietly rebuilding the same infrastructure. Rather than a startup, a big enterprise, a government department and a university lab each working out GPU efficiency from scratch, they pool the hard problems and the expertise needed to solve them, so everyone moves faster. It's early days for the organisation but there's serious momentum and serious financial backing behind it already.
They're hiring Performance Engineers at junior and senior level, to sit at the sharp end of that mission.
Day to day
You'd sit between the research and engineering teams, pulling real numbers off live training and inference runs rather than working from theory. From there, the job is building the models and calculators that turn those numbers into an actual answer: will this optimisation help, would a different accelerator be worth the spend, is this architecture change going to pay for itself. Those answers don't stay internal either, they shape what gets bought and how systems get built, for the organisation itself and for everyone else in the membership relying on that judgement.
What you'll...