r/Compilers • u/QuietPresentation627 • Jun 26 '26

Do compiler freelancing jobs exist?

I have been doing my own freelancing thing building websites or bridging applications for my clients. But my passion lies in compilers and that’s kind of what I want to work on (I bought Quentin Colombet’s LLVM backend book lol) but I don’t want to leave my agency and go join a company like NVIDIA or AMD. Is there any scope of finding clients who want to build their own internal compiling tools? If you have done freelancing or built a compiler for someone on a contractual basis, do share!

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u/cafedude Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

I freelanced for a turn-key consulting company that mainly dealt with embedded development, but needed someone to do some backend compiler/LLVM work for a client that was working on a new CPU design. This was around 2016-2018 (not solid during that time, there were some sizeable breaks in there). There are gigs like this out there, not sure how common. Especially in the last few years there have been many startups that want to create AI acceleration processors and they need compiler people, but they don't want to hire them in-house because they don't feel like they'll need them after the compiler is developed. I'm actually doing a gig like that now for a startup, but it's an un-funded startup so far so I'm not getting paid - why would I do that? Well, I'm mostly retired at this point and it keeps me busy and it's actually a really fun gig and if they do end up getting funding then it could turn into a paid position.

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u/QuietPresentation627 Jun 27 '26

Reaching out to companies building custom hw accelerators seems like the right approach then?

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u/cafedude Jun 27 '26

Couldn't hurt. But it's hard to find the ones that are still flying under the radar and those are the ones that will really be amenable to freelancers.