Hardware Lead Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team OpenAI’s Inference team powers the deployment of our most advanced models - including our GPT models, 4o Image Generation, and Whisper - across a variety of platforms. Our work ensures these models are available, performant, and scalable in production, and we partner closely with Research to bring the next generation of models into the world. We're a small, fast-moving team of engineers focused on delivering a world-class developer experience while pushing the boundaries of what AI can do. We’re expanding into multimodal inference, building the infrastructure needed to serve models that handle image, audio, and other non-text modalities. These workloads are inherently more heterogeneous and experimental, involving diverse model sizes and interactions, more complex input/output formats, and tighter coordination with product and research. About the Role We’re looking for a software engineer to help us serve OpenAI’s multimodal models at scale. You’ll be part of a small team responsible for building reliable, high-performance infrastructure for serving real-time audio, image, and other MM workloads in production. This work is inherently cross-functional: you’ll collaborate directly with researchers training these models and with product teams defining new modalities of interaction. You'll build and optimize the systems that let users generate speech, understand images, and interact with models in ways far beyond text. In this role, you will: Design and implement inference infrastructure for large-scale multimodal models. Optimize systems for high-throughput, low-latency delivery of image and audio inputs and outputs. Enable experimental research workflows to transition into reliable production services. Collaborate closely with researchers, infra teams, and product engineers to deploy state-of-the-art capabilities. Contribute to system-level improvements including GPU utilization, tensor parallelism, and hardware abstraction layers. You might thrive in t

About the Team The Release Engineer team is responsible for building and maintaining the systems that power software delivery—from CI/CD pipelines and artifact management to release automation and fleet telemetry. We ensure software across bootloaders, firmware, operating systems, and cloud services is built reproducibly, validated rigorously, and released safely at scale. About the Role As a Release Engineer, you’ll design, build, and operate release infrastructure that enables reliable, secure, and traceable software delivery across complex multi-component systems. You’ll partner closely with embedded, cloud, and QA teams to ensure that every build—from development to OTA deployment—is fast, verifiable, and production-ready. We’re looking for engineers who take pride in automation, build reproducibility, and system reliability—and who enjoy building the connective tissue that allows hardware and software to ship together seamlessly. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Design and operate CI/CD pipelines for multi-component builds (bootloader, firmware, OS images, backend, companion apps) using hermetic toolchains. Define versioning and branching strategies; automate promotions, changelogs, and artifact retention. Integrate unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test results; quarantine flaky tests, auto-bisect failures, and block unsafe promotions. Build A/B OTA update flows with verity and health checks; run staged rollouts and canaries; implement safe rollback and roll-forward strategies. Implement code signing for binaries and firmware, generate SBOMs, run vulnerability scanning, and attach build attestations and provenance. Manage dashboards and alerts for build health, promotion latency, failure rates, and fleet update telemetry. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience building and operating buil

About the Team: Compute Infrastructure builds the platform that turns enormous amounts of compute into a reliable engine for frontier AI. We design, provision, schedule, operate, and optimize the systems that connect accelerators, CPUs, networks, storage, data centers, orchestration software, agent infrastructure, developer tools, and observability into one coherent experience for researchers and product teams. Our work spans the entire stack: capacity planning and cluster lifecycle, bare-metal automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes and scheduling, deep system optimization, high-performance networking, storage, fleet health, reliability, workload profiling, benchmarking, and the developer experience that lets teams use enormous compute systems with confidence. At this scale, small improvements to communication, scheduling, hardware efficiency, or debugging workflows can compound into meaningful research velocity. We are hiring across Compute Infrastructure rather than for a single narrow team, and we use this opening to match strong engineers to the problems where they can have the most leverage. About the Role We are looking for engineers who want to build the compute platform behind OpenAI's research and products. You may not be the strongest in low-level systems, high-performance computing, distributed infrastructure, reliability, CaaS, agent infrastructure, developer platforms, tooling, or the user experience around infrastructure. What matters is that you can reason carefully about complex systems, write durable software, and raise the quality and velocity of the people around you. Depending on your background and interests, you might work close to hardware, close to users, on CaaS and agent infrastructure, or on the control planes and data planes in between. You could help bring new supercomputing capacity online, optimize training workloads from profiler traces and benchmarks, improve NCCL and collective communication behavior, reason about GPUs, NICs, t

About the Team Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and analysis to understand where time and cost are spent, then turn that understanding into performance optimizations and models that project performance and capacity needs for future launches. About the Role In this role, you will model inference performance across application, model, and fleet layers with higher fidelity. You will build cost-to-serve estimates from microbenchmarks and create tools that help cross-functional teams reason about latency, capacity, utilization, and cost tradeoffs. In this role, you will Build and refine performance models that translate microbenchmark results into cost-to-serve estimates. Analyze inference workloads end to end across applications, models, and fleet infrastructure. Enhance tooling to identify bottlenecks across layers for latency and throughput. Partner with other teams to turn performance insights into concrete improvements and project how future changes affect inference. You might thrive in this role if you: Enjoy reasoning from first principles about distributed systems, model inference, and hardware efficiency. Are comfortable working across abstraction layers, from application behavior to kernels, accelerators, networking, and fleet scheduling. Have deep expertise with performance profiling, benchmarking, analysis, and optimization. Enjoy collaborating with engineering and research teams to improve real production systems. 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 o