Compute - San Francisco and Seattle
About OpenAI
OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our mission requires building not only world-class AI modelsance inference capacity online across a diverse hardware ecosystem.
About the Team
The GPT Infrastructure team builds software that turns advanced inference and optimization research into production products. One focus is enabling strategic infrastructure partners and accelerator vendors to qualify and onboard new compute without a bespoke porting and optimization effort for every hardware platform.
We build the control planesance engineering, security, and external partnerships.
About the Role
We are seeking an experienced systems generalist who can work comfortably across the stack to help build an automated inference optimization platform. Given a workload, target hardware profile, compiler and runtime context, and a trusted verifier, the system runs durable optimization campaigns that generate, compile, execute, grade, and improve candidate kernels, runtime configurations, and serving-stack changes.
You will design both the OpenAI-hosted control plane and the partner-side software that evaluates candidates on real accelerator hardware. The product must keep long-running workflows reliableation.
This is a deeply cross-stack roleance intuition. You will work closely with research, inference engineering, infrastructure, security, product, and strategic partners to turn a powerful research workflow into a scalable product.
Key Responsibilities
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Design, build, and operate durable APIs and control-plane services for multi-hour or multi-day optimization campaigns, including scheduling, retries, budgets, checkpoints, artifact lineage, and observability.
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Build secure partner-side runner and grader software that can compile, execute, verify, and benchmark candidate artifacts on third-party accelerator hardware.
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Integrate hardware profiles, ISA and toolchain context, compilers, runtimes, and inference-serving engines into a repeatable optimization workflow.
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Turn research prototypes into reliable product surfaces with clear contracts, debuggable failure modes, reproducible outputs, and excellent developer ergonomics.
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Develop correctness and performance evaluation systems spanning latency, throughput, memory use, utilization, and cost efficiency.
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Build artifact, provenance, and qualification workflows that make optimized kernels, binaries, configurations, and reports safe to review and deploy.
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Collaborate with Research, Inference Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, Product, and Strategic Partnerships to deliver production-ready solutions.
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Drive technical architecture and execution across ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives that connect OpenAI systems with partner environments.
Basic Qualifications
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8+ years of professional software engineering experience building large-scale distributed systemss, or cloud services, or equivalent depth of experience.
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Strong programming skills in one or more of C++, Python, Go, or Rust.
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Experience designing and operating highly available backend systems, APIs, job orchestration systems, or durable workflows for production workloads.
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Strong understanding of distributed systems, Linux, networking, storage, containers, and modern cloud architectures.
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Experience debugging complex systems and using measurement, profiling, and benchmarks to guide engineering decisions.
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Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives as a senior individual contributor and work effectively across organizational boundaries.
Preferred Skills
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Experience with AI infrastructure, inference-serving systems, or large-scale machine learning systems.
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Experience with compilersance engineering; familiarity with technologies such as LLVM, MLIR, Triton, CUDA, or ROCm is a plus.
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Familiarity with GPUs, accelerators, hardware architecture, ISA concepts, or vendor toolchains.
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Experience with inference-serving frameworks or engines such as vLLM, SGLang, Triton Inference Server, or similar systems.
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Experience building developer platforms, external APIs, remote execution systems, or secure partner-facing infrastructure.
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Experience working with strategic cloud, hardware, or infrastructure partners.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Compensation
$293K – $445K + Offers Equity