Applied Ai Architect in San Francisco

About the Team We bring OpenAI's technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. About the Role OpenAI is looking for an experienced Performance Engineer to help us scale the performance, reliability, and efficiency of our systems. In this role, you'll apply deep technical expertise to optimize infrastructure and application-level performance across mission-critical products like ChatGPT and our developer API. You’ll work cross-functionally with teams building core services, training models, and developing real-time user experiences to push our latency, throughput, and cost-efficiency to the next level. We are looking for engineers who thrive in ambiguous environments, value deep systems understanding, and are motivated by delivering measurable impact. This is a highly technical, individual contributor role focused on root-cause analysis, profiling, instrumentation, and architecture-level performance improvements across our stack. In this role, you will: Analyze and optimize performance across application, middleware, runtime, and infrastructure layers—networking, storage, Python runtime, GPU utilization, and beyond. Develop tooling and metrics that provide deep observability into system performance. Collaborate closely with infra, platform, training, and product teams to identify key performance goals and drive systemic improvements. Influence architecture and design decisions to prioritize latency, throughput, and efficiency at scale. Lead investigations into high-impact performance regressions or scalability issues in production. Drive performance testing strategies and help define SLAs/SLOs around latency and throughput for critical systems. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong tr

About the Team The Applied team at OpenAI safely brings cutting-edge technology to the world. We have released widely used products such as ChatGPT, Sora, and the OpenAI API, powering models including GPT-5 and a growing set of multimodal capabilities across text, image, audio, and video. Our team also manages large-scale inference and platform infrastructure that supports these experiences at global scale. With much more on the horizon, our impact continues to grow. Our customers build fast-growing businesses using our APIs, unlocking product capabilities that were previously unimaginable. ChatGPT and Sora exemplify the breadth of what’s now possible across text, image, audio, and video experiences. As these capabilities expand, we prioritize the responsible use of our technology, emphasizing safe and thoughtful deployment over unchecked growth. Within Applied Engineering, the Ads Monetization team in Financial Engineering builds the core systems dealing with all the money flows for ChatGPT Ads. These systems are a combination of low-latency, high scale, high reliability, while being built in a financially correct, accurate, auditable and explainable way. This role sits at the intersection of ads delivery, data engineering, and financial systems. In this role, you will: Architect and build the core monetization systems for ChatGPT Ads. Build and operate the core services and pipelines that power ads monetization end-to-end, from event capture and validation through aggregation, pricing, metering, and ultimately producing billable outputs. Define and implement the source of truth for ads monetization data, including schemas, data models, and invariants that ensure outputs are consistent, explainable, and auditable. Own correctness and reconciliation: align production outputs with downstream invoicing/finance requirements, build controls/monitors, and close gaps through investigations and backfills. Develop across the stack to create comprehensive billing integration

About the Team The Monetization team is a new cross-functional group working across engineering, product, research, and design to build the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. Our mission is to develop user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products—including next-generation ads experiences—that strengthen user trust, unlock economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation. Monetization plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to continue pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities while ensuring the benefits of AGI are broadly shared. We believe monetization must be aligned with user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem of developers and businesses. This team operates in a greenfield environment and moves quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to bring research breakthroughs into real-world systems at global scale. About the Role We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help build the core infrastructure behind OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems. In this foundational role, you’ll architect and implement distributed systems that power OpenAI’s monetization stack—focusing on reliability, performance, privacy, and large-scale operation. You’ll work across backend, systems, and platform layers to define and implement 0→1 infrastructure, partnering closely with Product, Design, and Research to shape the future of monetized AI experiences. Your work will enable both internal and external teams to build on safe, scalable, and robust monetization primitives. This role is exclusively based across our San Francisco & Seattles sites. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Design and build the foundational backend and infrastructure powering OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems Architect large-scale distributed systems that

About the Team The Monetization team is a new cross-functional group working across engineering, product, research, and design to build the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. Our mission is to develop user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products, including next-generation ads experiences, that strengthen user trust, unlock economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation. Monetization plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to continue pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities while ensuring the benefits of AGI are broadly shared. We believe monetization must be aligned with user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem of developers, advertisers, and businesses. This team operates in a greenfield environment and moves quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to bring new ad experiences into real-world systems across OpenAI surfaces at global scale, including thoughtfully integrating them into the core ChatGPT experience. About the Role We’re looking for an Android Engineer to help build the native Android experiences and client-side systems that power how ads are structured, rendered, and delivered across OpenAI’s ads ecosystem. This role sits within the Ads Formats team, which owns the creative rendering and presentation layer for next-generation ads experiences across different surfaces and media types. You’ll help build the Android infrastructure and tooling that support formats such as text, image, video, native, conversational, and interactive ads, while ensuring they render reliably and perform efficiently across platforms. You’ll work closely with backend, Product, Design, Research, and Safety partners to shape Android architecture that supports user-first, privacy-preserving monetization experiences within ChatGPT and OpenAI’s broader mobile ecosystem. In th

About the role We’re looking for an engineering manager to lead a team building software systems that detect and prevent harmful misuse of frontier AI models—before incidents occur. This is a builder’s role: you’ll lead engineers shipping production services, detection pipelines, and mitigation mechanisms that protect frontier model integrity and reduce high-severity misuse risk. While this work intersects with frontier model development, security and risk, we’re explicitly seeking someone with a software engineering foundation who is comfortable building reliable systems that can operate at billions of users scale. In this role you will: Lead a team of software engineers building detection + mitigation systems for frontier model misuse, with an emphasis on model IP protection / distillation detection and emerging risk surfaces from autonomous agents. Set the technical roadmap and execution strategy: prioritize, design, ship, iterate, measure impact. Build production systems: services, pipelines, tooling, instrumentation, and automation that scale with frontier model usage. Partner deeply with Research and Product to translate evolving model capabilities into concrete tests, signals, and mitigations that can be deployed at scale. Drive strong engineering fundamentals: architecture, reliability, monitoring, performance, and operational excellence. Hire and grow an exceptional team across backend, data systems, and applied ML engineering domains as needed. Anticipate what breaks at scale as agentic workflows become more capable. You might thrive in this role if you: Experience building systems in adversarial, fast-evolving environments Are comfortable with ambiguity and novelty Have experience adjacent to security (e.g., abuse prevention, fraud, integrity, platform defense, auth/identity, malware/spam, adversarial environments) Communicate clearly and build trust quickly with senior stakeholders—pragmatic, collaborative, and calm under scrutiny. Significant experience

About the Team The Monetization team is a new cross-functional group working across engineering, product, research, and design to build the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. Our mission is to develop user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products—including next-generation ads experiences—that strengthen user trust, unlock economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation. Monetization plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to continue pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities while ensuring the benefits of AGI are broadly shared. We believe monetization must be aligned with user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem of developers and businesses. This team operates in a greenfield environment and moves quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to bring research breakthroughs into real-world systems at global scale. About the Role We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help build the core monetization and ads systems at OpenAI. This is a foundational role responsible for designing and implementing the infrastructure, APIs, and user-facing experiences that will power OpenAI’s next-generation monetization products—including ads. You’ll work across the full technical stack to architect, build, and ship 0→1 systems that are robust, safe, and scalable. You will collaborate deeply with Product, Design, and Research to define the future of monetized AI experiences and ensure these systems meet OpenAI’s highest standards for safety, privacy, and policy alignment. This role is exclusively based across our San Francisco and Seattle sites. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Design, build, and scale the core infrastructure behind OpenAI’s monetization and ads products Develop advertiser-facing APIs and tools that enable the cre

About the Team The Artifacts team is building the AI-native creation layer for documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, dashboards, reports, analyses, and new forms of interactive work products. We are rethinking what creation looks like when models can move from an ambiguous user goal to a polished, editable artifact with strong structure, taste, correctness, and speed. This is a high-agency team working across product, infrastructure, and research. We partner closely with model training teams to shape how frontier models create artifacts, and with ChatGPT product teams to turn those capabilities into experiences that millions of people can use. The work spans full-stack product engineering, model integration, rendering and editing systems, collaboration, storage, evaluation loops, and production reliability. Our ambition is to build the premier product experience for AI-generated artifacts: starting with familiar work products like slides, sheets, and docs, then expanding into new artifact types that are only possible in an AI-native world. About the Role As Engineering Manager, Artifacts, you will lead and grow the engineering team responsible for building this product and technical foundation. You will manage a team of full-stack and infrastructure-oriented engineers, set technical direction, and stay hands-on enough to shape architecture and debug hard problems. This role sits at the intersection of product engineering, research, and infrastructure. You will partner with researchers on how models are trained and evaluated for artifact creation, with product and design on the user experience. This is a strong fit for a technical manager who wants to build and ship, not only coordinate. The team has a fast trajectory, so you will help define both the product surface and the team that builds it. In this role, you will: Lead, manage, and grow a team building AI-native artifact creation experiences across documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, and emerging artifact form

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Global Capacity Manager focused on TPUs at Baseten, you will lead the "engine room" for our non-NVIDIA accelerator fleet, architecting, securing, and optimizing the Google Cloud TPU (and broader emerging accelerator) capacity that powers our customers' AI workloads. You'll own the end-to-end journey of capacity management for this fleet, from securing large-scale TPU pod allocations to building the automation that ensures reliable uptime across multi-cloud environments. This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want to bridge the gap between high-finance asset management and deep infrastructure engineering, with a specific focus on the TPU ecosystem. You will act as the fleet orchestrator for Google's TPU architecture, ensuring Baseten never experiences a capacity outage while maintaining elite unit economics as we diversify beyond NVIDIA. To be clear, this is a high-stakes engineering role. You will be hands-on with Kubernetes orchestration while also leading specialized pods focused on the latest generation of TPU hardware, like Google's Trillium (v6e) architecture, and partnering closely with the Model Performance (MP) team to ensure workloads are tuned for TPU-specific execution. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES The TPU Frontier: Architecting the infrastructure readiness and deployment strategy for Baseten's TPU clusters, including pod slicing and topology planning Global Workload Orchestration: Bui

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Global Capacity Lead at Baseten, you will lead the "engine room" of the company, architecting, securing, and optimizing the global GPU fleet that powers our customers' AI workloads. You’ll own the end-to-end journey of capacity management, from securing multi-million dollar GPU clusters to building the automation that ensures 99.9% uptime across multi-cloud environments. This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want to bridge the gap between high-finance asset management and deep infrastructure engineering. You will act as the fleet orchestrator for the world's most advanced chips, ensuring Baseten never experiences a capacity outage while maintaining elite unit economics. To be clear, this is a high-stakes engineering role. You will be hands-on with Kubernetes orchestration while also leading specialized pods focused on the next generation of hardware, like NVIDIA’s Blackwell (B200) architecture. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES The B200 Frontier: Architecting the infrastructure readiness and deployment strategy for Baseten's first Blackwell GPU clusters. Global Workload Orchestration: Building "Multi-cloud Capacity Management" systems to move customer workloads seamlessly across regions to optimize cost and latency. Precision GPU Triage: Developing automated Go-based operators to identify, cordon, and repair unhealthy H100 nodes in under an hour. The Supply Chain of Intelligence: Partnering with lead

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE As the Head of IT at Baseten, you will build, scale, and secure our internal technology function to support our rapid growth. Reporting to our Chief Information Security Officer, you will lead and mentor a team of 5+ IT engineers, leading the charge to transition Baseten from startup-era IT to a highly automated, enterprise-ready IT organization. You will take full ownership of corporate IT infrastructure, Helpdesk operations, corporate identity management, device lifecycles, and vendor procurement. As we scale to support the world’s most dynamic AI companies, you will ensure our internal systems scale seamlessly with our headcount, providing a secure, frictionless, and world-class technology experience for all Baseten employees. RESPONSIBILITIES Team Leadership: Manage, mentor, and grow a team of IT engineers, fostering a high-performance culture focused on technical excellence and end-user satisfaction. Helpdesk Operational Excellence: Build a fast-response support function by establishing clear response SLAs, tracking employee satisfaction metrics, and formalizing on-call and incident response processes. Zero-Touch Automation: Architect and implement automated employee onboarding, offboarding, and role-based access changes through deep integrations across HRIS, MDM, and IAM systems. SaaS Management & Procurement: Establish comprehensive SaaS management processes to eliminate shadow IT, automate access w

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten, you will partner directly with customers to architect, build, and deploy high-scale production AI applications on Baseten’s platform. You’ll own the journey with customers from initial exploration to production deployment, translating ambiguous business goals into reliable, observable services with clear quality, latency, and cost outcomes. This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want a front-row view into how modern companies adopt AI at scale and who enjoy working across product, software development, performance engineering, and customer-facing implementations. To be clear, this is an engineering role with hands-on coding and software development that also includes aspects of product management, technical customer success, and pre-sales solution engineering mixed in. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team: Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs RESPONSIBILITIES Develop and maintain software systems and product features using one or more general-purpose programming languages in a production-level environment, with a preference for Python due to its relevance in ML projects. Drive customer impact by designing, implementin

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE We’re looking for an Enterprise Account Executive to help build and scale Baseten’s Enterprise go-to-market motion. You’ll own new business in verticals where AI adoption is accelerating including enterprise software, financial services, and big tech. This is a high-autonomy role where you’ll contribute directly to our Enterprise GTM strategy—identifying new use cases within your verticals, winning lighthouse customers that become references for their industries, and feeding signal back to product and engineering to shape our roadmap. You’ll work alongside Baseten’s founders, forward-deployed engineering team, and GTM leadership. WHAT YOU’LL DO Own a revenue target and all aspects of the sales cycle from prospecting to close, including outbounding and engaging Tier 1 accounts in your assigned verticals Drive new logo acquisition and strategic expansion within key accounts, prioritizing organizations that can serve as lighthouse customers within their industries Become a trusted advisor to customers—understand their unique infrastructure needs, co-innovate on solutions, and lead with conviction by providing clear recommendations grounded in deep industry expertise Partner with Baseten’s forward-deployed engineers to run technical evaluations, POCs, and architecture reviews that earn customer confidence Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Legal, and Marketing to bring new solutions to marke

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Software Engineer at on the Training Infrastructure team, you'll architect and lead development of our training platform, supporting top tier research engineers and model developers. You'll make key technical decisions for the infrastructure enabling developers to deploy, scale, and monitor their workloads with high performance and reliability. You’ll own scheduling, storage, networking, reliability, and observability of technical systems in the training stack EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at what we’ve built so far: Overview of the product so far Training docs overview Story of the Training product Research we've done RESPONSIBILITIES Design and architect scalable infrastructure systems for our ML training platform (e.g. scheduling, storage, and networking) Partner closely with developers and research engineers to translate complex training requirements into technical solutions Design and architect a global training scheduler Design and architect reinforcement learning systems and continuous learning pipelines Drive long-term improvements to improve reliability of systems and velocity of development Partner closely with SRE and Capacity teams to unlock state of the art training infrastructure Make critical architectural decisions balancing performance with system reliability Lead technical discussions and mentor junior engineers on infrastructure best practices Contribute to long-term technical strateg

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE Baseten is building for talent density. We believe attracting and retaining exceptional people, and ensuring they feel recognized and valued for their impact, is core to becoming the best place to work. Compensation is a critical lever in that mission. As our Compensation Manager, you will own compensation programs company-wide. You’ll be a trusted advisor to senior leaders, shaping our compensation philosophy, leveling framework, and equity programs to ensure we remain competitive, principled, and performance-oriented as we scale. This role blends strategy and execution: designing clear, fair systems while moving quickly in a high-growth environment. RESPONSIBILITIES Own and evolve Baseten’s company-wide compensation strategy, philosophy, and programs. Collaborate with leadership and HRBP to create and evolve job architecture and leveling frameworks. Build and maintain compensation bands. Conduct regular market benchmarking to ensure comp bands and strategy remain competitive in a fast moving industry. Partner closely with Talent to design and approve competitive new hire offers, advising on negotiation strategy within our compensation principles. Lead bi-annual leveling and compensation review cycles to ensure market competitiveness and reward high performance across teams. Manage new hire equity grants in partnership with Finance and Legal. Design and administer a thoughtful equity refresher program for ten

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE This role sits at the frontier of our research agenda. You will pursue open problems at the intersection of post-training methodology and performant inference, and then collaborate with research engineering to translate findings into production systems. A meaningful portion of your time will be dedicated to research that deepens our understanding of how models learn, alignment, and architectural efficiency — questions that may not have immediate product application. The remainder will be directed toward research that solves concrete problems for Baseten's platform and customers, who are the fastest growing AI companies in the world like Cursor, Lovable, and Notion. We are looking for someone with sharp research taste and genuine creative instinct for problem selection. Someone who can identify questions that matter, design clean experiments to answer them, and push the state of the art. The environment here is not theoretical, but rather research that can be validated with eager customers who are serving billions of tokens a second. RECENT RESEARCH Towards infinite context windows: neural KV cache compaction Dense, on-policy or both? Repeated kv cache for long-running agents Distillation without the dark – replicating black-box on-policy distillation on Baseten RESPONSIBILITIES Define and pursue a research agenda spanning both foundational and applied work, with the applied component connected to Baseten's pla