Hardware - San Francisco and Seattle
About the Team
The GPT Infrastructure team builds systems that turn advances in model inference and optimization into reliable production capabilities. We enable OpenAI workloads to be qualified and optimized across new accelerator platforms without requiring a one-off port and tuning effort for every hardware target.
Our work spans distributed systemsance engineering, secure partner integrations, evaluation systems, and developer tooling. We build the infrastructure that makes optimization workflows automated, reproducible, and trustworthy.
About the Role
We are seeking a software engineer to help build the platform that qualifies and optimizes inference workloads across heterogeneous compute environments.
You will develop both OpenAI-hosted services and secure partner-side software for running long-lived optimization workflows. These workflows generate candidate kernelsance; and use the results to guide further optimization.
You will work across model architecture, distributed execution, compilers, runtimes, networking, and accelerator systems. A central part of the role is turning research prototypes and one-off hardware bring-up efforts into reliable, reusable infrastructure with clear contracts, reproducible results, strong observability, and well-defined security boundaries.
Key Responsibilities
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Design, build, and operate APIs and control-plane services for long-running workload qualification and optimization campaigns, including scheduling, retries, checkpointing, resource budgets, and observability.
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Build secure partner-side execution and evaluation software that can compile, run, verify, profile, and benchmark candidate artifacts on accelerator hardware.
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Integrate model workloads.
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Develop correctness and performance evaluation systems spanning output fidelity, latency, throughput, memory footprint, accelerator utilization, communication efficiency, scaling behavior, and cost efficiency.
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Automate the generation, evaluation, and improvement of kernels, runtime configurations, parallelization strategies, and serving-stack changes.
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Diagnose performance and correctness issues across model code, kernels, compilers, runtimes, memory systems, networking, collective communication, and hardware.
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Build artifact-management, provenance, regression-testing, and qualification workflows for kernels, binaries, configurations, evaluation results, and deployment reports.
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Turn experimental research workflows into reliable product surfaces with clear interfaces, actionable failure modes, and strong developer ergonomics.
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Collaborate with Researchs.
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Drive technical architecture and execution across ambiguous initiatives spanning OpenAI systems and partner environments.
Qualifications
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Strong software engineering experience building distributed systemss, or orchestration systems.
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Proficiency in one or more systems-oriented languages such as Python, C++, Go, or Rust.
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Experience designing and operating APIs, job orchestration systems, durable workflows, or large-scale backend services.
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Strong understanding of Linux, networking, storage, containers, distributed execution, and modern infrastructure architectures.
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Ability to reason about model execution and diagnose problems across software and hardware boundaries.
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Experience using profiling, tracing, benchmarking, and measurement to guide engineering decisions.
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Strong ownership and the ability to work effectively across research, engineering, security, product, and external-partner teams.
Preferred Skills
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Experience with AI infrastructures.
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Familiarity with GPU or accelerator architecture, memory hierarchies, interconnects, collective communication, and distributed model execution.
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Experience with compilersance engineering using technologies such as CUDA, ROCm, Triton, LLVM, or MLIR.
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Familiarity with inference engines or serving systems such as vLLM, SGLang, Triton Inference Server, or comparable internal systems.
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Experience with model partitioning, sharding, tensor or expert parallelism, and compute–communication tradeoffs.
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Experience building remote-execution systems, secure partner-facing infrastructure, evaluation harnesses, or artifact pipelines.
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Experience with automated optimization, search systems, coding agents, or evaluator-driven systems that iteratively improve kernels or runtime configurations.
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 – $385K + Offers Equity