Senior Performance Engineer Jobs in Minnesota (NOW HIRING)

Collaborate with Innovative 3Mers Around the World

Choosing where to start and grow your career has a major impact on your professional and personal life, so it's equally important you know that the company that you choose to work at, and its leaders, will support and guide you. With a variety of people, global locations, technologies and products, 3M is a place where you can collaborate with other curious, creative 3Mers.

This position provides an opportunity to transition from other private, public, government or military experience to a 3M career.

The Impact You'll Make in this Role

As an AI Software Developer, Early Career, you will join an internal incubator building a new-to-the-world AI architecture and a new technical category. You will work alongside experienced researchers and engineers to convert Python research and development code into scalable production components, primarily in Rust. You will receive clearly scoped assignments and learn an uncommon approach to AI while building tests, simulations, runtime services, and performance improvements that help move foundational research into real-world systems.

• Translating well-specified Python research modules into readable, tested, maintainable, and performant Rust components.

• Building and maintaining unit, integration, regression, simulation, behavioral-equivalence, determinism, and reproducibility tests. QA and Production validation.

• Implementing stable interfaces and runtime components within a modular architecture designed to protect proprietary intellectual property.

• Profiling CPU usage, memory, latency, and throughput; partnering with senior developers to improve performance and scalability.

• Supporting concurrent and parallel execution, Python/Rust interoperability, containerization, CI/CD, observability, and deployment automation.

• Helping create components that can support real-time inference, near-real-time reasoning, offline simulations, cloud services, on-premises systems, and embedded or edge environments.

• Working closely with research and engineering teammates to clarify requirements, acceptance criteria, and appropriate tradeoffs between algorithm adaptation and reference fidelity.

• Documenting designs, interfaces, tests, benchmarks, and operating assumptions so components can be safely understood and maintained.

• Learning structured relational, causal, and neural symbolic computation from experienced researchers and applying that knowledge to production software.

• Contributing to a collaborative, low-ego team culture centered on curiosity, disciplined engineering, and responsible handling of confidential intellectual property.

Your Skills and Expertise

To set you up for success in this role from day one, 3M is looking for candidates who must have the following qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, applied mathematics, physics, cognitive science, computational neuroscience, or a related field (completed and verified prior to start) from an accredited institution.

OR

• High School Diploma/GED (completed and verified prior to start) AND five or more years of experience developing, testing, and maintaining, software or technology systems, including substantial hands-on programming experience.

AND

• Five (5) years programming ability in Python and either C++, Rust, or another systems programming language.
• Three (3) years of core software-engineering practices, including version control, code review, debugging, automated testing, and technical documentation.

Additional qualifications that could help you succeed even further in this role include:

• Ability to understand unfamiliar algorithms, break work into testable components, and collaborate effectively with researchers and senior engineers.
• Hands-on Rust experience or a strong interest and demonstrated ability to learn Rust quickly.
• Experience converting prototypes, research code, simulations, or mathematical algorithms into robust software.
• Coursework or experience in algorithms, data structures, operating systems, concurrency, parallel computing, compilers, graph algorithms, or high-performance computing.
• Exposure to symbolic AI, neural-symbolic systems, cognitive architectures, causal reasoning, analogical reasoning, reinforcement learning, constraint solving, or simulation systems.
• Experience with Python/Rust or Python/C++ interoperability, containers, Kubernetes, Cloud Providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), on-premises systems, CI/CD, databases, graph stores, or messaging systems.
• Experience with profiling, benchmarking, deterministic execution, reproducible experiments, or performance-sensitive software.
• A collaborative, communicative low-ego working style, intellectual curiosity, testing discipline, and sound judgment when handling confidential or access-controlled intellectual property.

Location: Onsite in 3M Center Maplewood, MN

Travel: May include up to 5% travel

Relocation Benefits: May be offered

Must be legally authorized to work in country of employment without sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H1B status).

Supporting Your Well-being

3M offers many programs to help you live your best life - both physically and financially. To ensure competitive pay and benefits, 3M regularly benchmarks with other companies that are comparable in size and scope.

Chat with Max

For assistance with searching through our current job openings or for more information about all things 3M, visit Max, our virtual recruiting assistant on 3M.com/careers.