Fall 2026

Kernel Engineer Internship

Tilde Research

Tilde Research

11-50 employees

Full-stack AI interpretability and control solutions

No salary listed

Palo Alto, CA, USA + 1 more

More locations: San Francisco, CA, USA

In Person

Category
Software Engineering (1)
Required Skills
Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)
Neural Networks
CUDA
PyTorch
Machine Learning

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Requirements
  • Have experience in deep learning or related research areas.
  • Have demonstrated exceptional capability in working on machine learning kernels, including through strong open-source contributions, thoughtful technical blog posts or work logs, or previous experience working on hardware-aligned algorithms.
  • Have deep familiarity with PyTorch and more than one of Triton, TK, and TileLang; basic familiarity with CUDA; and knowledge of GPU architecture.
  • Communicate clearly and effectively, both verbally and in writing.
  • Be a strong algorithmic thinker.
  • Be able to learn quickly.
Responsibilities
  • Design, develop, and tune custom GPU kernels for core model operations.
  • Work with machine learning engineers to prototype and scale novel model architectures.
  • Contribute to system-wide efforts to improve efficiency and throughput beyond kernel-level optimizations.

Tilde Research provides full-stack interpretability tools for AI systems, including general interpreter models and control mechanisms to guide how features flow through inference pipelines. These tools help human experts collaborate with AI by aligning model decisions with human input and existing fine-tuning methods. The approach focuses on deployment-time control and orchestration, adding a layer of insight that sits between raw prompts and model outputs. The goal is safer, more understandable AI that can handle complex tasks within standard deployment workflows.

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

N/A

Total Funding

N/A

Headquarters

Palo Alto, California

Founded

2024

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Tilde closed an $8M seed round in July 2025, led by Khosla Ventures.
  • Its July-August 2026 hiring for ML and kernel roles signals active product-building.
  • The October 2025 Telescope post promises more MoE interpretability releases within weeks.

What critics are saying

  • Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind are racing interpretability, crushing Tilde's niche.
  • Tilde still depends on research claims; no customers, revenue, or deployments are public.
  • If frontier labs ship built-in interpretability, Tilde's standalone lab dies by 2027.

What makes Tilde Research unique

  • Tilde Research, founded 2024 in Palo Alto, sells applied interpretability, not dashboards.
  • Its Sieve work showed sparse autoencoders improved Llama-3.1-8B reasoning and generation control.
  • MoMoE and MoBA posts tie interpretability research directly to faster training infrastructure.

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Growth & Insights

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