---
title: "Asaf Gardin"
category: "people"
role: "Senior Software Engineer/Inference Engineer"
company: "AI21"
linkedin: "https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-asaf-gardin/"
sourceLabels: ["Official speaker roster", "Official conference schedule"]
---
# Asaf Gardin

## Profile
Senior Software Engineer/Inference Engineer at [[ai21|AI21]].

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-asaf-gardin/)

## Biography
Asaf Gardin is a Senior Software Engineer on the inference team at [[ai21|AI21]] Labs, where he works on high-performance LLM inference and the production deployment of the Jamba hybrid SSM-Transformer models. He's an active vLLM committer, contributing to quantization, scheduling, and support for Mamba-based architectures. His talk covers two production bugs in vLLM's Mamba support - a scheduler edge case that corrupted SSM state under memory pressure, and a 32-bit integer overflow in a CUDA kernel that surfaced as RL training instability - both root-caused at [[ai21|AI21]] and fixed upstream. He also built Kernel Academy, a browser-based tutorial for learning Triton GPU programming. Previously at IBM.

## Conference Sessions
- [[2026-07-01-asaf-gardin-two-bugs-that-hid-in-plain-sight-a-vllm-debugging-detective-story]] — Two Bugs That Hid in Plain Sight: A vLLM Debugging Detective Story (2026-07-01, 3:20pm-3:40pm)

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph summarizes how this person appears across the conference source graph: scheduled sessions, linked videos, transcripts, and slide-derived evidence.

### Linked Sessions
- [[2026-07-01-asaf-gardin-two-bugs-that-hid-in-plain-sight-a-vllm-debugging-detective-story|Two Bugs That Hid in Plain Sight: A vLLM Debugging Detective Story]]

### Media Signals
- `youtube-Ywl4LsvHKzU` — 8 slide-derived text signals
- Slide-derived themes for `youtube-Ywl4LsvHKzU`: world, local, questions, name, answers, assuming, answer, lies.
- Evidence links for `youtube-Ywl4LsvHKzU`: [[youtube-Ywl4LsvHKzU]], [[youtube-Ywl4LsvHKzU-slides]], [[youtube-Ywl4LsvHKzU-dense-slides]], [[youtube-Ywl4LsvHKzU-reconstructed-slides]]