Junior/Assistant Specialist - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The University of California, Berkeley
About this position
Position Overview
Position title: Junior/Assistant Specialist Salary range: The UC academic salary scales set the minimum pay determined by rank and step at appointment. See the following tables(s) for the current salary scale(s) for this position: T24 B . A reasonable full-time salary estimated for this position is $57000 - $73200 Percent time: 100% Anticipated start: Spring, 2027 Position duration: One year, with the possibility of reappointment based on performance and availability of funding.
Application Deadline
Open date: October 17, 2026 Next review date:Sunday, Nov 1, 2026 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time) Apply by this date to ensure full consideration by the committee. Final date: Tuesday, Nov 17, 2026 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time) Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled.
Position Description
The SLICE Lab at UC Berkeley aims to democratize the design, programming, and integration of domain-specific computing at scale so that a wide-range of applications can benefit from specialized hardware, extending the continued growth in computational capabilities for future-generation computing ecosystems. Under the direction of the Principal Investigator (PI), the Junior/Assistant Specialist will provide specialized technical support for research on compiler systems, agentic AI, and hardware–software co-design for emerging heterogeneous computing architectures. Responsibilities include: Implementing and integrating intermediate representations, executable specifications, compiler abstractions, and multi-fidelity architectural models into the lab’s research infrastructure. These tools will help researchers study the connections between application, compiler, architecture, and hardware-level decisions. Support experiments on agentic methods for automated design-space exploration, compiler synthesis and optimization, hardware specification refinement, and mapping machine learning and robotics workloads onto specialized accelerators and heterogeneous systems. The role will also includes developing testing and validation workflows, running benchmarks, and analyzing and documenting findings on programmability, correctness, performance, data movement, and architectural tradeoffs. The PI will set the research objectives and priorities.
Qualifications
Basic qualifications(required at time of application)Bachelor's degree (or equivalent international degree) or enrolled in Bachelor’s degree or equivalent international degree program Additional qualifications(required at time of start)Bachelor's degree (or equivalent international degree) Preferred qualificationsBachelor's Degree or equivalent international degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a closely related technical field, or equivalent technical experience. Research or development experience in compiler systems, computer architecture, hardware-software co-design, or related systems areas. Strong programming experience in C/C++ and Python. Experience with compiler intermediate representations, compiler transformations, code generation, or program optimization. Knowledge of computer architecture, heterogeneous computing, and hardware-software interfaces. Experience developing and experimentally evaluating systems research prototypes. Experience with MLIR, LLVM, IREE, TVM, CIRCT, or comparable compiler and intermediate-representation frameworks. Experience designing compiler dialects, IR transformations, lowering pipelines, tiling and fusion strategies, quantization flows, instruction selection, target-specific code generation, or compiler optimization passes. Experience with hardware-software co-design, including using workload characterization and compiler-generated performance data to inform ISA, accelerator, memory-system, or microarchitectural design decisions. Experience with RTL and hardware-development infrastructure such as Verilog/SystemVerilog, FPGA prototyping, CIRCT, Chipyard, FireSim, Verilator, VCS, or comparable simulation and verification environments. Experience with architectural or multi-fidelity modeling, including functional, cycle-approximate, data-movement, performance, or hardware-interface models. Experience developing agentic AI or LLM-based systems for compiler construction, program synthesis, hardware generation, automated verification, design-space exploration, or software engineering.
Application Requirements
Document requirementsCurriculum Vitae - Your most recently updated C.V. Cover Letter Reference requirements 2 required (contact information only) Apply link:https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05540 Help contact:pdatta@berkeley.edu