Research Engineer, Large-Scale Training

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Seattle, Washington D.C., Raleigh, London, and Amsterdam. We are the Data Foundation & AI team within Plaid’s Data organization. Our mission is to build the shared ML and AI infrastructure that powers intelligent capabilities across Plaid’s product suite. We develop the foundational systems, models, and data assets that transform Plaid’s unique financial network data into scalable, general-purpose representations that teams across the company can leverage. Our work spans the full ML lifecycle — from large-scale data curation and model pretraining to production serving, evaluation, and monitoring. As part of the team, you’ll work at the intersection of machine learning infrastructure, applied AI, and distributed systems, helping establish the core AI platform that enables innovation across Plaid. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will lead the technical strategy and development of Plaid’s foundation models, driving key decisions across pretraining objectives, model architecture, and fine-tuning approaches that power a wide range of downstream product applications. You will serve as the technical lead for the full machine learning lifecycle, overseeing everything from data curation and experimentation to production deployment,

About the Team The OpenAI Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role As a Research Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design and scale the infrastructure that powers large-scale multimodal training and evaluation at OpenAI. You’ll manage distributed data pipelines, collaborate closely with researchers to translate requirements into robust systems, and harden pipelines that serve as the backbone for OpenAI's rapid iteration cycles. We’re looking for engineers who are detail-oriented, have strong experience with distributed systems, and excel at building reliable infrastructure in high-stakes environments. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, machine learning infrastructure while ensuring scalability, reliability, and security. Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient. Partner with researchers to deeply understand requirements and translate them into production-ready systems. Harden, optimize, and maintain critical data infrastructure systems that power multimodal training and evaluation. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong experience with distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure with a strong interest in data. Are detail-oriented and bring rigor to building and maintaining reliable systems. Demonstrate excellent software enginee

About the Team The Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) team works across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure to build AI systems that accelerate and ultimately conduct high-quality research at OpenAI. We work to automate real research workflows and improve research productivity by building systems and feedback loops, designing evaluations, and training models to develop missing capabilities. Our work spans the full lifecycle of model training, evaluation, and deployment to help researchers move faster and tackle increasingly ambitious problems. About the Role We’re hiring research scientists , research engineers , and AI systems engineers to work on automating research at OpenAI. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. In this role, you will: Design evaluations for research judgment, hypothesis generation and testing, and long-horizon experiment execution. Turn real research workflows and model failures into data and evaluation flywheels. Improve model research capabilities through agent harnesses, synthetic data, RL environments, and model training. Build and maintain safe, reliable integrations between our models and OpenAI’s research infrastructure. Develop research agents, experiment-orchestration systems, and sandboxed runtimes that support real research workflows. Create metrics and economic models to understand RSI’s current and future effects on research productivity, model capabilities, and the safety of internal deployments. This is a high-ownership role for researchers and engineers who thrive in ambiguity, move fluidly between research and implementation, and turn emerging opportunities into rigorous, reliable, scalable results. You might thrive in this role if you: Have research or engineering experience across LLM training, model evaluations, agent systems, synthetic data, research infrastructure, or large-scale distributed systems. Are a strong generalist who can move between open-ended research and practical implementation, turning ambig

About the Team Training Runtime designs the core distributed machine-learning training runtime that powers everything from early research experiments to frontier-scale model runs. With a dual mandate to accelerate researchers and enable frontier scale, we’re building a unified, modular runtime that meets researchers where they are and moves with them up the scaling curve. Our work focuses on three pillars: high-performance, asynchronous, zero-copy tensor and optimizer-state-aware data movement; performant, high-uptime, fault-tolerant training frameworks (training loop, state management, resilient checkpointing, deterministic orchestration, and observability); and distributed process management for long-lived, job-specific and user-provided processes. We integrate proven large-scale capabilities into a composable, developer-facing runtime so teams can iterate quickly and run reliably at any scale, partnering closely with model-stack, research, and platform teams. Success for us is measured by raising both training throughput (how fast models train) and researcher throughput (how fast ideas become experiments and products). About the Role As a Training Performance Engineer, you’ll drive efficiency improvements across our distributed training stack. You’ll analyze large-scale training runs, identify utilization gaps, and design optimizations that push the boundaries of throughput and uptime. This role blends deep systems understanding with practical performance engineering — analyzing GPU kernel performance, collective communication throughput, investigating I/O bottlenecks, and sharding our models so we can train them at massive scale. You’ll help ensure that our clusters are running at peak performance, enabling OpenAI to train larger, more capable models with the same compute budget. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Profil

About the Team pAGI Infra team builds and operates the systems that make large-scale model training and evaluation reliable, efficient, and easy to run. Our work spans distributed training infrastructure, inference and grading platforms, compute scheduling, and research tooling. We partner closely with researchers and engineering teams to turn new research needs into dependable infrastructure, improve GPU efficiency, and shorten the path from an experiment to a validated model. About the Role We’re looking for an AI Systems Engineer to help scale the infrastructure behind our training and evaluation workflows. You’ll own projects from identifying bottlenecks and designing solutions through deployment and operation. The work combines distributed systems engineering, performance optimization, and close collaboration with researchers. You might build a shared grading service, improve resource allocation across workloads, or bring a new training stack into production — directly improving how quickly and reliably research moves forward. In this role, you will: Build and operate infrastructure for large-scale training and evaluation, improving reliability, throughput, and resource efficiency. Develop shared inference and grading platforms with automated capacity management, health monitoring, and visibility into performance. Improve compute scheduling and resource allocation to reduce idle GPU time and help workloads recover quickly from failures. Diagnose bottlenecks across training, inference, and orchestration, and work across teams to improve end-to-end performance. Build self-service tools, automated validation, and observability that help researchers launch experiments, diagnose issues, and compare results with less manual intervention. You might thrive in this role if you: Are excited about the potential of personal AGI and want to build the infrastructure that enables it. Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building or operating large-scal

About the Team The Platform Systems team at OpenAI operates at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and large-scale distributed systems. We build the engineering and research infrastructure required to train OpenAI’s flagship models on some of the world’s largest, custom-built supercomputers. Our team develops core model training software and works deep in the stack - spanning collective communication, compute efficiency, parallelism strategies, fault tolerance, failure detection, and observability. The systems we build are foundational to OpenAI’s research velocity, enabling reliable, efficient training at frontier scale. We collaborate closely with researchers across the organization, continuously incorporating learnings from across OpenAI into the evolution of our training platform. About the Role As a Software Engineer, Platform Systems, you will design and build distributed systems that provide visibility into large-scale training workloads and help operate them reliably at scale. You’ll work on failure detection, tracing, and observability systems that identify slow or faulty nodes, surface performance bottlenecks, and help engineers understand and optimize massive distributed training jobs. This infrastructure is critical to operating OpenAI’s training stack and is actively evolving to support new use cases and increasingly complex workloads. This role sits at the core of our training infrastructure, blending systems engineering, performance analysis, and large-scale debugging. In This Role, You Will Design and build distributed failure detection, tracing, and profiling systems for large-scale AI training jobs Develop tooling to identify slow, faulty, or misbehaving nodes and provide actionable visibility into system behavior Improve observability, reliability, and performance across OpenAI’s training platform Debug and resolve issues in complex, high-throughput distributed systems Collaborate with systems, infrastructure, and research teams to evolve platform