Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40
Joined 2022-11-02 Message
Incoming links: Google
Craig Silverstein Updated 2025-07-16
Dan Abramson Updated 2025-07-16
Dan, if you ever Google yourself here, please contact Ciro Santilli: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to do something with OurBigBook.com. Cheers.
eGroups Updated 2025-07-16
Company co-founded by Scott Hassan, early Google programmer at Stanford University, and Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother.
The company was sold to Yahoo! in August 2000 for $432m and became Yahoo! Groups. They managed to miraculously dodge the Dot-com bubble, which mostly poppet in 2021. After the acquisition, Yahoo started to redirect them to: groups.yahoo.com as can be seen on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20000401000000*/egroups.com The first archive of groups.yahoo.com is from February 2001: web.archive.org/web/20010202055100/http://groups.yahoo.com/ and it unsurprisingly looks basically exactly like eGroups.
Eli Benderski Updated 2025-07-16
Homepage: eli.thegreenplace.net/
Also has many great contributions on Stack Overflow: stackoverflow.com/users/8206/eli-bendersky
As of 2016, Eli worked at Google (reference). TODO before that, I had found his earlier info previously but lost it.
Eli focuses mostly on compiler toolchains.
He also has some mathematics stuff, so cute: eli.thegreenplace.net/2015/change-of-basis-in-linear-algebra/
Epic Stack Overflow users Updated 2026-01-30
These are some users Ciro Santilli particularly respects, mostly due to their contributions to systems programming subjects:
- unix.stackexchange.com/users/885/gilles-so-stop-being-evil
- stackoverflow.com/users/379897/r-github-stop-helping-icea
- stackoverflow.com/users/196561/osgx
- stackoverflow.com/users/50617/employed-russian Employed Russian. Binutils, ELF, GDB, claims to work at Google. The only Russian sounding name on GDB and Binutils git log is that of Paul Pluzhnikov: www.linkedin.com/in/paul-pluzhnikov-61b9676/ and Employed Russian mentions one of his commits at: stackoverflow.com/questions/3718072/gdb-takes-too-long-and-ctrl-c-has-no-effect Ex physicist: www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Pluzhnikov
Ciro also really likes the following users, a bit less like Gods, and bit more like friends:
- partly because they were close by on the yearly reputation charts for a long time circa 2020, so it feels like they also focus on replying to important questions rather than answering new duplicates immediately:
- stackoverflow.com/users/642706/basil-bourque: GCC dev, but started replying lots of Java questions as of 2021 it seems for some reason
- stackoverflow.com/users/541136/aaron-hall: Python, NixOS and Haskell more and more it seems. Also pro freedom of speech, gotta love those religious liberal Republicans. Reminds Ciro of Ron Maimon very slightly, maybe it's just the New Yorkedneess. Ciro once met another intelligent dude who liked both Haskell and NixOS, there must be some correlation.
- VonC: Git God, VonC is just Super nice, gives clear credit to others, always positive interactions. Love this dude. He was the one that held the Necromancer record in 2019 before Ciro took it.
- Peter Cordes. An assembly maniac this one. And a really nice one too. Sometimes pedantic, but always nice, and always correct. He's been going into God level more and more it must be said:In 2024 VonC was found to have been used LLMs to generate part of his answers, and later publicly apologized: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072/a-commitment-to-amend-and-move-forward It is not clear why he had used them though. He remained user #1 in 2025 however, even despite not using them anymore as far as it is known.
Other interesting people:
- stackoverflow.com/users/560648/lightness-races-in-orbit Lightness Races in Orbit. C++ God. Interesting aesthetics. Real name: Tom Lachecki, British, as per:As of 2023 marked "retired" from Stack Overflow, rep graph suggests since 2020.
- stackoverflow.com/users/3681880/suragch the number 3 necromancer dude. But then in 2022 he found God and mostly quit: suragch.medium.com/programming-was-my-god-89b625164a69
- www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1ealv82/the_fall_of_stack_overflow/ The Fall of Stack Overflow
Evil Updated 2025-07-16
Things that are not nice such as:
- Taboola, Outbrain, and other chumbox
- BLOBs
- Europe cookie law
- adhesive inside mobile phones and more generally, planned obsolescence
- Jupyter Notebook
- typographical characters that look like ASCII ones, but are not the ASCII ones, e.g. typographical quotes, em-dash. The non-breaking hyphen is not even whitespace, and by def Why not stick to ASCII when ASCII is good enough?
- excessive encapsulation
- replacement of master and slave terminology from technology
- mailing lists. And to add insult to injury, HTML on mailing list messages instead of plaintext.
- blank lines in code added by people trying to increase clarity, especially when there is already indentation for that. Every blank line must be preceded by a line comment explaining what the following block is about, or removed.
- messaging software that force you to have a mobile phone
- advertisements by telephone/SMS
- "state" such as global variables and object members, long live functional programming?
- mosquitoes, the only intrinsically bad thing about tropical countries
- projects with slow compilation times
- Microsoft Windows
- the 2019 Chinese government
- e-learning websites that only allows verified teachers to write content. Cowards who can't handle ranking algorithms.
- domain-specific language
- a build system without an out-of-tree option
- non-linear Git history: stackoverflow.com/questions/20348629/what-are-advantages-of-keeping-linear-history-in-git
- visual programming languages like Scratch. Waste of time. Text programming languages are already equally as visual due to indentation:Just make good serious gamedev libraries and integrated development environments for those real languages instead.
if x == 0: x = 1 - software that prevents you from running as root. Let me fucking shoot myself in the foot if I want to. It is better than having to deal with your hand holding bullshit, which is done in a different way for every project. E.g.: stackoverflow.com/questions/17466017/how-to-solve-you-must-not-be-root-to-run-crosstool-ng-when-using-ct-ng/53099177#53099177
- Medium
- luxury goods
- euphemism
- closed access academic journals are evil
- websites without OAuth
- shower room without a window to the exterior (mould!!!)
- single programs with their interface split across multiple windows, e.g. GIMP, ZynAddSubFX
- graphical user interfaces
- logograms
- infinitesimals. Just use limit instead, please
- country
- knowledge olympiads
- programming languages without a decent dominating package system
- closed source offline software used by millions
- exams
- security through obscurities
- dots in Gmail address
- things in websites that look like links, and behave like links, but don't let you middle click to open them on a separate tab
- K-pop
- numerical computing language
- fiscal paradises
- when the front-end of an website changes an important permanent state, but the URL does not change
- splash screens: you should show boot messages so that people will know what to Google for when things fail. Do you think computer newbies will be afraid and have nightmares?
- milk chocolate: why would you eat that instead of dark chocolate if you are older than 10?
- to talk about something without giving the real name to not scare off the audience
- mathematical symbol that looks like a Greek letter but isn't. Or perhaps mathematical notation in general
- when more than two people gather to play a board game or video game, and two or more people start chatting on and on about random subjects rather than concentrating on the game
- watching television while eating. Same for reading, or doing basically anything else but eat. The only acceptable activity is talking relaxedly, not about work.
- noises coming out of your bicycle. It is so hard to find where they come to fix them!!!
- code drop
- private cars as opposed to public transport. As a cyclist, you can just see the effect that large roads have on nearby areas, it just destroys nature.
- closed standards
- double consonants that make no difference to sound. Dilema? Dilemma? Dillema? Dillemma? Please!
- social media websites that show stuff from people you don't follow when you don't explicitly want that, including things which are not ads, just random suggestions. Twitter starting being like that cirac a 2022. Facebook got worse around that time. It is a constant fight against those stupid websites.
- socks with short legs that don't protect your ankle/lower calf from cold/scratches/dirt, e.g. liner socks
- Presta valves. Why would such a flimsy tech have become so popular compared to the infinitely superior Schrader!
Existence and uniqueness of solutions to Maxwell's equations Updated 2025-07-16
ExpertRank Updated 2025-07-16
Was adopted by AskJeeves in 2001.
The Google Story Chapter 11. "The Google Economy" comments:
As they saw it, generation one was AltaVista, generation two was Google, and generation three was Teoma, or what Ask Jeeves came to refer to as Expert Rank. Teoma's technology involved mathematical formulas and calculations that went beyond Google's PageRank system, which was based on popularity. In fact, the concept had been cited in the original Stanford University paper written by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as one of the methods that could be used to rank indexed Web sites in response to search requests. "They called their method global popularity and they called this method local popularity, meaning you look more granularly at the Web and see who the authoritative sources are," Lanzone said. He said Brin an Page had concluded that local popularity would be exceedingly difficult to execute well, because either it would require too much processing power to do it in real time or it would take too long.
googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/03/expertrank-authoritative-search.html mentionsand:
ExpertRank is an evolution of IBM's CLEVER project, a search engine that never made it to public.
The difference between PageRank and ExpertRank is that for ExpertRank the quality of the page is important and that quality is not absolute, but it's relative to a subject.
There are other more recent algorithms with similar names, and are prehaps related:
- www.researchgate.net/publication/257015904_ExpertRank_A_topic-aware_expert_finding_algorithm_for_online_knowledge_communities ExpertRank: A topic-aware expert finding algorithm for online knowledge communities (2013)
- ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5260966 ExpertRank: An Expert User Ranking Algorithm in Online Communities
Fabrice Bellard Updated 2025-07-16
Creator of QEMU and FFmpeg, both of which Ciro Santilli deeply respects. And a bunch other random stuff.
What is shocking about Fabrice this is that both are insanely important software that Ciro Santilli really likes, and both seem to be completely unrelated subjects!
Google made billions on top of this dude:
- FFmpeg is the backend of YouTube
- QEMU is the default emulator for Android Studio as of 2019, which Android developers use by default under the hood to develop Android Apps on their desktop without the need for a real device.
At last but not least, Fabrice also studied in the same school that Ciro Santilli studied in France, École Polytechnique.
It is a shame that he keeps such a low profile, there are no videos of him on the web, and he declines interviews.
Another surprising fact is that Fabrice has not worked for the "Big Tech Companies" as far as can be publicly seen, but rather mostly on smaller companies that he co-founded: www.quora.com/Computer-Programmers/Computer-Programmers-Where-is-Fabrice-Bellard-employed
And he's also into some completely random projcts unsurprisingly:
- www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/ Computer Scientist Fabrice Bellard Announces Computing Pi to Record Number of Digits
Bibliography:
- smartbear.com/de/blog/2011/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/ contains a list of his projects as of 2011
Fabrice Bellard in 2007
. Source. At a restaurant with the author apparently. Plus Miguel De Icaza who was in Paris for some conference, which they all presumably attended.
Fabrice Bellard with light
. There are no in-focus images of Fabrice on the Internet. Golden (wiki) Updated 2025-07-16
April 2024: merged with some fraud protection thing, is it sill a Wiki? Unclear, seem sto have lost that aspect: twitter.com/judegomila/status/1783028847983956430
techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/golden-launch/Exactly! Deletionism on Wikipedia is so sad, and especially for companies. In particular e.g. Ciro Santilli tried to create a page for PsiQuantum, and it got reverted... and now golden has one of the largest Google hits for it: golden.com/wiki/PsiQuantum-PBDGXRA
To state the obvious: Wikipedia is an incredibly useful website, but Gomila pointed out that notable companies and technologies like SV Angel, Benchling, Lisk and Urbit don’t currently have entries. Part of the problem is what he called Wikipedia’s “arbitrary notability threshold,” where pages are deleted for not being notable enough. (This is also what happened years ago to the Wikipedia page about yours truly — which I swear I didn’t write myself.)
TODO how do they do moderation?
As of April 2024Asked at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1777250258235302233 Their last tweets were from August 2023, so maybe they just silently shutdown? Their name is too generic and hard to search for efficiently...
Login is currently disabled.
They do have knowledge graph built-in which is cool.
Google Maps Updated 2025-07-16
Early on jumpstarted from several acquisitions, notably Keyhole Inc. and Where 2 Technologies.
Google Quantum AI Updated 2025-07-16
The "AI" part is just prerequisite buzzword of the AI boom era for any project and completely bullshit.
According to job postings such as: archive.ph/wip/Fdgsv their center is in Goleta, California, near Santa Barbara. Though Google tends to promote it more as Santa Barbara, see e.g. Daniel's t-shirt at Video "Building a quantum computer with superconducting qubits by Daniel Sank (2019)".
Google Quantum Campus Created 2024-12-13 Updated 2025-07-16
Built 2021. TODO address. Located in Santa Barbara, which has long been the epycenter of Google's AI efforts. Apparently contains fabrication facilities.
Google Street View Updated 2025-07-16
Street View's go into the past mode is the dream of every archaeologist. Ciro can only dream of a magic street view that allows going back to earlier centuries and beyond... isn't it amazing to think that people in the future will have that ability to time travel back to around the year 2006? Ciro wonders how long Google will be able to keep storing data like that.
Thanks, CIA.
GPT model by Google 2025-12-13
grep Updated 2025-07-16 How to teach Advertise your material Updated 2025-07-16
Once you have crated something awesome, you have to advertise it, otherwise no one will ever find it.
This means:
- Then ask them if they want to talk about anything.
- whenever someone asks as question on an online forum, answer it, and link to the section of your material that also answers that question.The material will answer many of their future questions.
Eventually, people will find you on the front page of Google searches, and then you will know that you've truly made something useful.
Ilana Wisby Updated 2025-07-16
Founding CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits.
As mentioned at www.investmentmonitor.ai/tech/innovation/in-conversation-with-oxford-quantum-circuits-ilana-wisby she is not the original tech person:Did they mean Oxford Sciences Enterprises? There's nothing called "Oxford Science and Innovation" on Google. Yes, it is just a typo oxfordscienceenterprises.com/news/meet-the-founder-ilana-wisby-ceo-of-oxford-quantum-circuits/ says it clearly:
she was finally headhunted by Oxford Science and Innovation to become the founding CEO of OQC. The company was spun out of Oxford University's physics department in 2017, at which point Wisby was handed "a laptop and a patent".
I was headhunted by Oxford Sciences Enterprises to be the founding CEO of OQC.
oxfordquantumcircuits.com/story mentions that the core patent was by Dr. Peter Leek: www.linkedin.com/in/peter-leek-00954b62/
Interesting members of the Santilli family Updated 2025-07-16
Found through Google with no direct relation known to Ciro Santilli:
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santilli: Wikipedia page of the glorious family, Santillis with their own Wikipedia page:
- Ruggero Santilli: "fringe science guy", by far dominates Google as of 2019. Created the respectable R.M. Santilli Foundation
- Ray Santilli made a fake 1995 alien autopsy movie, YouTube sample: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVcaT2QnoDs
- Ivana Santilli: Canadian singer, pop-electric-chill: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQRuVN0H8dM
- accounts on important websites
- github.com/santilli anonymous GitHub as of 2019
- santilli.com/ for rent by realnames.com/ (wiki page) as of 2019
- Also Brazilian and tech related like Ciro Santilli.
- www.youtube.com/user/TheOverthrowShow thepetesantillishow.com/ Pete Santilli, American Conservative news commentator show, makes Ciro cringe of boredom. At least he has a passion.
Possibly related variants:
- Santillo:
- Will Santillo who makes somewhat artistic porn photos. His website with several free demos: santillophotography.com/
- www.linkedin.com/in/ciro-santillo-2025a6ba/ a "Ciro Santillo", github.com/Ciruxx, also a programmer
- Santilly, a town in Saône-et-Loire department, France
- santilly.com/ redirects to www.pompes-funebres-santilly.com/fr/, a French funerary service
Job application by Ciro Santilli Created 2025-04-18 Updated 2026-10-18
2026 just trying to sacrifice my amazing life quality to do something more meaningful:
2025 round one during week of April 21st, not toning down online profiles:
- quantum computing:
- Paris quantum computing:
- Alice&Bob:
- jobs.lever.co/alice-bob/2acf8f0c-6947-41ad-b30f-9779a1b49681 Senior Software Engineer, Framework team
I'm looking to do a meaningful job in a deeptech field, and quantum computing seems like it could become huge. I've learnt a few basics, and would like to go further with job experience in the area.
Salary: 90k.Rejected after first interview with the hiring manager. They said they wanted someone with more experience setting up CI/CD. - 2025-07-03 jobs.lever.co/alice-bob/b4632e27-cf56-4570-84bb-d56a169d1c43 Senior Software Engineer - Cloud. Webdev. I don't really want to do this, but it's a way in. Asking salary: 70k. Rejected 2025-07-11.
- 2025-09-02 jobs.lever.co/alice-bob/b7386caa-70dd-4670-bb69-a5c97322332f Senior Software Engineer - Firmware Calibration
- Pasqal:
- careers.pasqal.com/jobs/5817098-software-development-engineer-integration Software Development Engineer IntegrationApplication auto-reply also points to:which is cool.Rejected 1 week later without interview even though my CV seemed like a perfect match for this job. Sent an email to the contributors of Pulser.After the application they keep sending you relevant new job openings, which was really good, applying to another one:I applied for this job careers.pasqal.com/jobs/5817098-software-development-engineer-integration but got rejected by HR lady without interview.Pinging you guys here just in case because sometimes my profiles scare the HR people and then when I ping the programmers they like me. I grabbed your emails from GitHub.
- 2025-06-20 careers.pasqal.com/jobs/6075845-embedded-software-engineer-w-m Embedded Software engineerRejected 2025-07-03.Why Pasqal?I want to get into quantum computing in France, and there are only 5 major hardware companies and I'm applying to each of them when there's a job that seems that I can do. I don't know enough to pick the one with the tech that is most promising to win, though it seems no one can at this point. Being in Massy, a little further from central Paris, is a plus, I like quieter areas.
- 2025-09-04 careers.pasqal.com/fr/jobs/6379846-mid-senior-software-engineer-h-f Mid-Senior Software Engineer - H/F. Cloud.Rejected 2025-09-26.
J'ai une forte envie de faire ce job. Le quantum computing a l'air trop cool, l'impact pourrait être énorme, et les techs de base (high performance computing) du job m'amusent aussi. Mes études basiques jusqu'à présent : cirosantilli.com/quantum-computing. Ma femme est employée par une entreprise française et je cherche à déménager dans la région parisienne.
- C12 Quantum Electronics
- 2025-06-20 Senior Measurement Software Engineer jobs.lever.co/c12qe/0b27ff8c-a094-4da4-ba32-2ecd55ae6233
I am interested in getting into quantum computing because the this field seems like it could be promising. My wife is French and working for a French company in Paris and we are looking to relocate to the greater Paris region. I've heard good things from the company. I have only done basic undergrad physics in university but I'm very interested in learning more from a more concrete point of view, AMO seems really cool. I can handle low level programming well.
- jobs.lever.co/c12qe/82658084-331d-4ba3-bc01-cec1d364cfe4 Junior Software Engineer. Rejected 2025-09-22.
- Quandela:
- 2025-09-05 apply.workable.com/quandela/j/546CECA897/ Support QPU Engineer - Technical Account Manager. Was stated as software engineer on LinkedIn I think. Rejected 2025-09-09.
- Welinq: none yet but add to loop
- Alice&Bob:
- UK quantum computing:
- Oxford Ionics
2025-07-15 Senior Software Engineer apply.workable.com/oxford-ionics/j/F82EC50A7A/Rejected 2025-07-29.I would like to work in quantum computing as the field seems promising. The software hw stack also seems really cool, python rust artiq and FPGA, sign me up for that.
- Riverlane
- 2026-07-31
- 2025-08-17
- apply.workable.com/riverlane/j/5B86BF380A/ System Software Engineer. Rejected 2025-08-29.
- apply.workable.com/riverlane/j/42D4AB487A/ Software Engineer - Modelling. Rejected 2025-09-09.
I've been watching quantum computing lightly from a distance, and I would be very excited to get involved and try to help, it seems like something really worth trying for humanity, my notes: cirosantilli.com/quantum-computing I'm very curious about learning more about the physics of quantum computers and error correction.
- Quantinuum
- 2025-08-26 jobs.eu.lever.co/quantinuum/0535d099-4f84-4ef3-a3fa-a182dde4362a Backend Software Engineer. Rejected 2025-08-29.
- Infleqtion
Python is my default scripting language and I've used it in all my enterprise jobs. Eg on open source here is a Linux kernel development setup I've automated with python github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat and here is a VCD parser I've adopted github.com/cirosantilli/vcdvcd
- Oxford Ionics
- Other quantum computing:
- Haiqu: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4289782247 Software Engineer (Quantum Platform and Tools)
- ParityQC: parityqc.com/careers Software Engineer for Quantum Computing. I did two interviews and was seriously considered for the position I believe. But at that point I had already accepted another offer, partly leading to a huge rent increase, so I asked for 80k GBP and living in the UK and that was too much unfortunately. If I had asked for less, and possibly considered moving back to continental Europe, then it might have worked out. Will this be another one of those things that I regret not having done for the rest of my life? Time will tell.
- Paris quantum computing:
- Machine learning
- UK machine learning
- DeepMind:
- Turned down two days later before anything.As evidenced by my Stack Exchange contributions, I love trying out new software to see if it works and how well. I love benchmarking it. And I love documenting what I observed in great detail to help others to choose the best software for them. I also love meeting various new people and understanding what they are up to and how I can help.
- job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/jobs/6576118 Software Engineer, Hardware Design
At ARM and AMD I've worked on various different parts of the hardware cycle, notably C++ emulation and low level software. I just get this strong feeling that hardware and low level software design should be the easiest thing for machines to automate, as it is the area that requires the least amount of "common sense" information about the world.
- Reflection AI: 2025-10-10 jobs.ashbyhq.com/reflectionai/5fa84d35-6e2c-409c-b2fe-6bc211a94091 Member of Technical Staff - Software Engineer. Rejected 2025-10-12 of course.
- DeepMind:
- Paris machine learning:
- H Company:Fastest initial job application steps ever! Name, email, CV, over.
- jobs.ashbyhq.com/hcompany/e6793ce6-918b-48a6-bf56-205c477cc1c0 Member of technical staff (Evaluations). Declined 12th June.
- jobs.ashbyhq.com/hcompany/89d867e7-2bd3-4918-aebc-cabbac526b6f Senior Back-end Engineer
- Mistral AI:
- jobs.lever.co/mistral/db67d7a2-bcec-4151-9b3a-8212ddabf419 Senior Software Engineer, Data Engineering - Paris. Declined May 7th without interview, at least they said they have lots of applicants and some have more closely related qualifications.
- 2025-07-03
- jobs.lever.co/mistral/c1e1e2c0-03f4-4434-938a-a5df3080baf2 Software Engineer, IDE (Typescript), (Contractor). VS Code browser extension.
Available from September. I made this extension as a small part of my personal project over a month full time: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ourbigbook.ourbigbook-vscode It has no installs because the personal project is a failure, but the extension works. I can do other stuff besides the vscode extension itself as well. But I need at least 1 year contract.
- jobs.lever.co/mistral/e76d2957-2bf6-4d8f-90a2-29bf9a927823 Software Engineer, Product (Python)Got an interview.I have 3 years full time on my failed website: ourbigbook.com/ My frontend is meh but backend is OK. Never done huge volumes though since the project was a failure. But Heroku + my basic PostgreSQL DB fu held up to 3k visits / day when I got some coverage for cirosantilli.com/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites from www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14752155/CIA-fake-websites-Star-Wars-communicate-spies.htmlI've also did some automatic population of the database to 100k rows and my indices seem to be right that the website is still usable: docs.ourbigbook.com/news/llm-generated-wikibot-abstracts
- jobs.lever.co/mistral/c1e1e2c0-03f4-4434-938a-a5df3080baf2 Software Engineer, IDE (Typescript), (Contractor). VS Code browser extension.
- Poolside AI:> Of all the applications of deep learning, code generation is one of those that interest me the most as they seem one of the most pertinent in order to one day achieve AGI (the others being theorem proving and robotics), and I'd like to try and get some work experience in the area, which is why I'm applying to your company.This job seemed like a possibility as I've done some personal "data intensive" projects in the past (not distributed unfortunately, ~500 GB so it fit on my local disk), and I kind of enjoyed it and would be interested in trying out a more "data heavy" job like this for a change.
Rejected May 6th without interview. - Nabla jobs.ashbyhq.com/nabla/85543350-f2e4-4328-95c2-7716ce143279 Back-End Engineer. There was also a Senior but I didn't have the 5 years experience lol. Rejected 2025-07-21.
- Cohere
- 2026-08-04 jobs.ashbyhq.com/cohere/138b7442-1e5f-439e-97a3-bb9e41673c81 Senior/Staff Software Engineer, EMEA, Agentic Platform. Considered but didn't apply, they asked for too much experience.
- H Company:
- UK machine learning
- Big tech:
- Google. Many jobs in London, nothing in Paris. www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results
- www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/91141790538572486-senior-software-engineer-google-pixel-graphics Senior Software Engineer, Google Pixel Graphics. Went through entire interview process but LeetCode not good enough. Non-Leetcode went great.
- www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/96937277808091846-senior-software-engineer-pixel-graphics-gpu-software Senior Software Engineer, Pixel Graphics, GPU Software
- 2025-07-22 www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/113249786332619462-senior-software-engineer Senior Software Engineer, TPU Performance, Hardware/Software Co-Design. Hopeless but one must try.
- Amazon, focusing on AWS of course. Lots of jobs in London, nothing in Paris: www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/
- 2025-06-20
- www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2915117/software-development-engineer-aws-uk Software Development Engineer, AWS Utility Computing
- www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/jobs/2884321/systems-development-engineer-database-services Systems Development Engineer, Database Services. Rejected two days later on a Sunday, nice.
- www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/jobs/2530616/senior-systems-development-engineer Senior Systems Development Engineer
- www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/jobs/2902679/senior-systems-engineer Senior Systems Engineer
- 2025-06-20
- Apple Inc., focusing on low level and or embedded bullshit just to see if they give interviews:
- jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200523081/swe-kernel-engineer-coreos
- jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200577840/gpu-driver-engineer-kernel-firmware first received an email saying I would get an interview. But then they 180'ed a few hours later with some excuse. But the job announcement was still up. So it feels like something fishy happened, e.g. I failed some security check.
- jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200604360/virtualisation-engineer
- 2025-09-10 jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200520511-2114/gpu-modeling-engineer GPU modeling
- Microsoft: a few jobs in London, very few in Paris
- Facebook: several boring jobs in London, a few research jobs in Paris
- Google. Many jobs in London, nothing in Paris. www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results
- London machine learning:
- InstaDeep:
- www.instadeep.com/job-offer/fea583b3-d333-447e-8811-8ce58367c003/ Software Engineer (Simulation) asking 85k
I really like the idea of using simulations to speed up development of ideas or AI. I've done this in my past jobs in the semiconductor industry, and a bit on side time tinkering with simple simulation games that might be useful to train AI. I'm curious to what you will be simulating! The general areas that your company operates in, biotech and PCB design are also in my interest.lI really like the idea of using simulations to speed up development of ideas or AI. I've done this in my past jobs in the semiconductor industry, and a bit on side time tinkering with simple simulation games that might be useful to train AI. I'm curious to what you will be simulating!
- www.instadeep.com/job-offer/fea583b3-d333-447e-8811-8ce58367c003/ Software Engineer (Simulation) asking 85k
- Anthropic
- 2025-06-18
- job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4632138008 Software Engineer, Infrastructure. Declined first thing next Monday.
- job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4753256008 Software Engineer, Inference Scalability and Capability. This one suggested JAX, Rust and multi-GPU experience would be good. Haha it's hopeless.
- job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4632830008 Software Engineer, ML Performance and Scaling
I just want to help achieve AGI so I don't need to work anymore. I can do non-glamorous things to achieve that goal, but eventually I'd inevitably get into research itself. I haven't done deep learning except basic examples, but I can handle low level stuff, and I want to learn.
Why Anthropic?I'm applying to any LLM companies, and the ones with more funding are more likely to have dumb coding jobs that I can do without a PhD in ML, and more likely to have the resources to reach some critical point if scaling continues. The small labs have the advantage of nimbleness to try new architectures, but they only employ PhDs.I think I got the first stage technical thing for this one. But it was the most weird exercise ever, 2 hours to finish, they had a compiler in Python with a simplified GPU-like architecture and you're supposed to optimize a algorithm written in their custom assembly (writen in plain Python to make things even worse) and I was not able to do anything besides understand the problem somewhat. Then the reject came immediately.In one paragraph, provide an example of something meaningful that you have done in line with your values. Examples could include past work, volunteering, civic engagement, community organizing, donations, family support, etc.*Endless open source knowledge sharing e.g.:- stackoverflow.com/users/895245 Stack Overflow
- github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat Linux kernel emulation tutorial
- ourbigbook.com/ my failed knowledge sharing website that only I use
- www.matta.ai/careers/backend-engineer Backend EngineerHi, I'm applying to this job because I get a feeling that using machine learning to improve industry is cool and useful.My backend experience is 3 years full time on my failed open source elearning project: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook / ourbigbook.com/ the last of which I did after receiving a 100k pound grant. The website is written in Node.js + PostgreSQL, but I also like Python (went with Node.js for Next.js in this case) and have used Python professionally on my jobs and also for personal project, see CV or e.g. github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat I also did a bit of Django previously.I've never handled huge traffic on that site because it failed to gain interest, but on rare occasions where a post got traction it survived 3k requests / day just fine. I've done some amount of SQL optimization and performance verification, and I've added 100k AI generated posts to it and it survived, meaning my indexes were OK.
- InstaDeep:
- Semiconductor:
- AMD:
* careers.amd.com/careers-home/jobs/57882 Senior Software Development Engineer on ROCm. Rejected a few days later without interview.
* careers.amd.com/careers-home/jobs/65271 Virtual Software Modeling Engineer - Qualcomm: very few client jobs in France, a decent amount in UK, but nothing too good fitting at first glance
- Arm, all with referrals from old colleagues:
- 2025-06-30:
- GPU
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/staff-principal-software-engineer/33099/77726588832 Staff Software Engineer - System Performance Analysis GPU driver. Got screening interview. Rejected 2025-07-18.
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/staff-software-engineer-system-performance-analysis/33099/77284796288 Staff/Principal Software Engineer. Linux kernel driver. Rejected after final technical interview 2025-08-15.
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/principal-software-engineer-machine-learning/33099/82468207936 Principal Software Engineer - Machine Learning. Seems ambitions but friend recommended me so I just clicked. Rejected 2025-07-03.
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/staff-gpu-software-applications-engineer/33099/82643339264 Staff GPU software applications engineer. Got screening interview with hiring manager. Got 80k GBP offer 2025-09-04.
- Non-GPU
- carers.arm.com/job/cambridge/staff-software-engineer/33099/74848341808 Staff Software EngineerSounds cool.
This diverse role will largely focus on providing software enablement for our next generation CPU and accelerator based technologies on target use-cases.
- careers.arm.com/job/manchester/staff-application-performance-engineer/33099/80144718528 Staff Application Performance EngineerReally cool. I don't have the perf pre-requisites, but it would be cool to do this. Rejected 2025-07-03.
performance workflows on Arm Neoverse platforms
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/senior-software-engineer-machine-learning-tools/33099/74848310720 Senior Software Engineer - Machine Learning Tools. Got screening interview. Rejected 2025-07-16 by hiring manager before interview.
- experienced-arm.icims.com/jobs/14442/senior-linux-kernel-engineer-%e2%80%93-hardware-enablement Senior Linux Kernel Engineer – Hardware Enablement. Rejected 2025-07-05.
- experienced-arm.icims.com/jobs/12987/staff-software-engineer/job?mode=submit_apply Staff Software Engineer
Accelerating algorithms with hand-optimized Arm assembly using the latest Arm technologies such as SVE
- 2025-08-21
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/senior-performance-tools-engineer/33099/75816396960 rejected 2025-08-26
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/senior-software-performance-analysis-engineer/33099/74720022336 rejected 2025-08-25
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/senior-software-engineer-networking-for-ai/33099/81797177488
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/senior-software-engineer-cpython-runtime/33099/84058266624 I was not particularly qualified for this but a friend referred so I clicked. Got first technical interview, but rejected because as I told them from the start, I don't know much about interpreters.
- carers.arm.com/job/cambridge/staff-software-engineer/33099/74848341808 Staff Software Engineer
- GPU
- 2025-06-30:
- Intel: no jobs in UK/France
- Nvidia: a few high end jobs in UK/France, some of them are EMEA remote
- 2025-06-30 Senior Software and System Architect nvidia.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/NVIDIAExternalCareerSite/job/Spain-Remote/Senior-Software-and-System-Architect_JR1997578?locationHierarchy1=2fcb99c455831013ea52aa2df70e324e Read wrong, seems to require senior networking skills that I don't have, but by then had already asked for a referral from an ex colleague and so just applied anyways. Lol! rejected 2025-07-16
- 2025-06-04 nvidia.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/NVIDIAExternalCareerSite/job/UK-Remote/Senior-System-Software-Engineer--Base-OS-Kernel_JR1999799 Senior System Software Engineer, Base OS Kernel. Rejected.
- Codasip: no SW jobs in UK, only HW
- SiFive: only 10 jobs globally, 1 sales in UK
- Graphcore:
- 2025-07-02 job-boards.greenhouse.io/graphcore/jobs/7743036002 Staff System Software Engineer. Automation and testing stuff. Got first interview with technical person. Rejected 2025-08-22.
- Undo:
2027-08: client support, through recruiter, did first light technical and went well, did second with manager and not so well then reject. Asked me where I see myself in 5 years and replied no fucking idea whoever pays the most in semiconductors.
- AMD:
- EDA:
- Open source
- Canonical
- Linux kernel engineering: failed after take home exercise
- Common Crawl: commoncrawl.org/jobs Software Engineer/Data Scientist, Python, Spark
- Canonical
- Random compute
- Atos, now mostly Eviden: all jobs require 10 years of experience lol
- Random french tech
- Random deeptech:
- Oxford:
- Oxford Instruments 2025-07-21 jobs.oxinst.com/job/Oxford-Senior-Software-Engineer/819253802/ 70k salary. Cover: I just want to do something sciency. Rejected one day later.
- Proxima Fusion 2025-07-15 Research Software Engineer jobs.lever.co/proximafusion/23aab9a8-34ec-40d2-bb14-440f1130021c Got screening interview, but rejected afterwards on 2025-08-08 before technical.
- Salience Labs 2025-09-10 careers.saliencelabs.ai/jobs/6208031-embedded-software-engineer Rejected 2025-09-20.
- Oxford:
- biotech maybe
- optical compute
- NcodiN: no jobs
- Flux Computing:
- Robotics
- HPC
- Formal proof:
This application is hopeless, but here's the pitch. One thing that would be really really awesome for formal mathematics would be a website where anyone (including bots) can go and prove whatever theorem they want on the web UI or API, and then it gets formally verified, and the proven results shows up on the web UI, and other people can use it for their own further proofs. So it's a bit like Lean's mathlib, but the advantage over a centralized standard library is that you don't need to review people's pull requests. And you can do stuff like "watch if a results is proven". More babling at: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/website-front-end-for-a-mathematical-formal-proof-system Cheers.
- self-driving
Keywords:
- GPU
- C++
- Linux
- systems software
- numerical software
- robotics