Software Engineer, ML Performance

About the Team

Our Inference team brings OpenAI’s most capable research and technology to the world through our products. We empower consumers, enterprises and developers alike to use and access our state-of-the-art AI models, allowing them to do things that they’ve never been able to before. We focus on performant and efficient model inference, as well as accelerating research progression via model inference.

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced performance engineer to join the Inference Engineering team. This role is focused on improving the efficiency, speed, and reliability of our inference systems. You’ll work across the stack to identify bottlenecks, implement optimizations, and help us get the most out of our hardware.

Responsibilities

• Profile system performance and identify issues across GPU, CPU, memory, and networking layers

• Work with engineers and researchers to improve throughput, latency, and reliability in our inference stack

• Build tooling and infrastructure to make performance issues easier to detect and debug
  Drive efforts to optimize core components, including kernel usage, data movement, and scheduling

• Own performance investigations end-to-end, from debugging to implementation
  

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in performance engineering or a related role

• Strong background in systems-level debugging, profiling, and optimization

• Proficiency in Python and/or C++

• Experience working with performance-critical systems (e.g., games, VFX, HFT, distributed systems)

• Familiarity with GPUs and performance tooling (e.g., CUDA, Nsight, perf, flamegraphs) is a plus

• Comfortable working cross-functionally and independently identifying high-impact work

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, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement .

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

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

$310K – $460K + Offers Equity