Low Level Software Engineer (SPU)

Vorticity is building the world’s first Scientific Processing Unit (SPU), a new class of silicon purpose-built to accelerate scientific computing beyond the limits of GPUs. We are designing tightly coupled software–hardware systems around applied mathematics workloads to deliver order-of-magnitude performance gains. Unlocking its full potential requires early, deep engagement from applied mathematics–driven software engineers who can translate real-world scientific workloads into executable models, kernels, libraries, and applications that inform both architecture and tooling decisions.

From day one, you will help build the numerical software foundation of the SPU. The ideal candidate is excited to implement mathematics on a new architecture. You will work closely with hardware architects, compiler engineers, and runtime engineers to shape how numerical algorithms are expressed, executed, and optimized on the SPU. This position is ideal for someone who enjoys moving fluidly between applied math, numerical algorithms, and parallel programming, and who wants to help build a new scientific computing platform from the ground up.

Responsibilities

• Prototype and implement core numerical linear algebra kernels and libraries for the SPU.

• Translate mathematical algorithms into executable, performance-relevant software.

• Write C, C++, and Python reference implementations to guide hardware, compiler, and runtime decisions.

• Collaborate with hardware architects, compiler engineers, and runtime teams to evaluate algorithm–architecture tradeoffs and ensure numerical primitives map cleanly to the SPU programming model.

Core Skills:

• Strong foundation in applied mathematics, numerical linear algebra, and scientific computing, with the ability to turn mathematical ideas into correct and efficient software.

• Strong proficiency in C, C++, and Python.

• Comfort working close to hardware and writing performance-critical, low-level code.

• Experience with parallel or accelerator programming models such as CUDA, OpenMP, MPI, SYCL, HIP, or similar.

• Ability to reason about memory layouts, cache behavior, bandwidth, arithmetic intensity, and parallel execution.

• Solid understanding of concurrency fundamentals, including race conditions, atomics, synchronization, and thread/process behavior.

Nice to Have Skills:

• Familiarity with numerical computing libraries such as BLAS, LAPACK, FFTW, Eigen, SuiteSparse, PETSc, cuBLAS, cuSOLVER, cuSPARSE, cuFFT, or similar.

• Experience building numerical libraries, solvers, scientific computing frameworks, or HPC infrastructure.

• Familiarity with performance analysis tools or modeling techniques, including profilers, roofline models, hardware counters, or analytical performance models.

• Exposure to compilers, runtimes, code generation frameworks, or domain-specific languages for numerical computing.

• Experience applying numerical methods in scientific domains such as physics, geophysics, CFD, climate, materials, fusion, or finance.

Non-Technical Qualities:

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

• Comfort operating in an early-stage environment where the hardware, compiler, and software stack are evolving together.

• Willingness to put in the hard work needed to bring the SPU to life.

• Above all: low ego.

As passionate scientists and engineers, we are well aware of the plethora of critical problems in the world that cannot be solved because humanity simply does not have enough computing power. To address this, Vorticity is developing a radically new silicon chip architecture and system to dramatically accelerate scientific computing problems.

Vorticity’s mission is to expand human ingenuity. To do that we are building a team of exceptional people to work together on big problems. Join us!