  We show a pulse-efficient circuit transpilation framework for noisy quantum
hardware. This is achieved by scaling cross-resonance pulses and exposing each
pulse as a gate to remove redundant single-qubit operations with the
transpiler.Crucially, no additional calibration is needed to yield better
results than a CNOT-based transpilation. This pulse-efficient circuit
transpilation therefore enables a better usage of the finite coherence time
without requiring knowledge of pulse-level details from the user. As
demonstration, we realize a continuous family of cross-resonance-based gates
for SU(4) by leveraging Cartan's decomposition. We measure the benefits of a
pulse-efficient circuit transpilation with process tomography and observe up to
a 50% error reduction in the fidelity of RZZ({\theta}) and arbitrary SU(4)
gates on IBM Quantum devices.We apply this framework for quantum applications
by running circuits of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm applied
to MAXCUT. For an 11 qubit non-hardware native graph, our methodology reduces
the overall schedule duration by up to 52% and errors by up to 38%
