Steven Arellano

Steven Arellano
Occupation	Software engineer, entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder of Wafer

Steven Arellano is an American software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Wafer, a company that develops AI-powered GPU performance engineering tools. Wafer, which describes itself as "AI that makes AI fast," profiles, diagnoses, and optimizes GPU code across kernels, models, runtimes, and inference pipelines.

Early career

Prior to founding Wafer, Arellano held a series of software engineering positions at prominent technology and finance companies. In 2022, he participated in Meta's CS Above & Beyond Fellowship program in Menlo Park, California. That same year, he worked as a software engineer at Sei Labs in San Francisco, contributing to open-source blockchain technology.

In 2023, Arellano completed a software engineering internship at Google in New York. He subsequently interned at Two Sigma Investments in New York during the summer of 2024, followed by another software engineering internship at Google in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked on the Cloud Spanner emulator. During 2024, he also served as a researcher at AxLab, a research group within the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science.

Wafer

Arellano co-founded Wafer in 2025 alongside Emilio Andere. The company is based in San Francisco, California, and is a Y Combinator backed startup. The company's product functions as an AI-driven GPU performance engineer, enabling software engineers to identify and resolve latency issues, optimize model performance, and maintain efficiency across AI workloads. The platform provides code-level visibility to diagnose slowdowns stemming from model code, data loading, or hardware limitations.

Wafer's tools are used by engineers at several notable organizations, including Intel, LinkedIn, Red Hat, Pinterest, Nuro, Datadog, Naver, and MIT, among others. The company was previously known as Herdora before rebranding as Wafer.