Hardware Systems Planning Lead in San Francisco

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’s Model Performance (MP) team is responsible for ensuring the models running on our platform are fast, reliable, and cost‑efficient. As part of this team, you’ll focus on Model APIs — the infrastructure powering our hosted API endpoints for the latest open‑source models. This work spans distributed systems, model serving, and developer experience. You’ll join a small, high‑impact team operating at the intersection of product, model performance, and infra, helping to define how developers interact with AI models at scale. RESPONSIBILITIES: Design, build, and operate the Model APIs surface with focus on advanced inference capabilities: structured outputs (JSON mode, grammar-constrained generation), tool/function calling and multi-modal serving Profile and optimize TensorRT-LLM kernels, analyze CUDA kernel performance, implement custom CUDA operators, tune memory allocation patterns for maximum throughput and optimize communication patterns across multi-GPU setups Productionize performance improvements across runtimes with deep understanding of their internals: speculative decoding implementations, guided generation for structured outputs, custom scheduling and routing algorithms for high-performance serving Build comprehensive benchmarking frameworks that measure real-world performance across different model architectures, batch sizes, sequence lengths, and hardware configurations Productionize performa

About Flexport: At Flexport, we believe global trade can move the human race forward. That’s why it’s our mission to make global commerce so easy there will be more of it. We’re shaping the future of a $10T industry with solutions powered by innovative technology and exceptional people. Today, companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—use Flexport technology to move more than $19B of merchandise across 112 countries a year. The recent global supply chain crisis has put Flexport center stage as we continue to play a pivotal role in how goods move around the world. We are proud to have the support of the best investors in the game who believe in our mission, solutions and people. Ready to tackle global challenges that impact business, society, and the environment? Come join us. Help Win New Business The Opportunity: We are scaling our dedicated Data Center practice, and we are looking for the person who will lead it. This is a founding commercial role. You will start as a team of one, owning the full sales motion end-to-end, and you will build the team around you as the practice grows. You will define how Flexport goes to market with hyperscalers, hardware OEMs, and the broader ecosystem. You will set the playbook, win the first marquee accounts, and hire the people who scale what you build. Reporting directly to the Regional General Manager, you will operate with a high degree of autonomy and direct access to executive leadership. This role features a 50/50 compensation model (Base + Uncapped bonus, with accelerators), with OTEs of $350k+, designed for strong leaders who take bets on themselves. Why This Role Is Different: The data center logistics market is not a standard freight problem. A single AI compute rack can cost more than $1 million and weigh up to 4,000 pounds. Racks contain Class 9 dangerous goods (lithium-ion batteries) and liquid cooling systems requiring specialized handling. Construction sequencing failures delayed 57% o

About the Team The Post-Training Frontiers team is responsible for training the frontier agents OpenAI ships to the world (GPT-Next). We train the flagship agentic models behind Codex, ChatGPT, and the API through large-scale reinforcement learning. The team’s work spans four areas. First, execution and science: working with teams across OpenAI to decide what can go into the final model and how, using scientific experiments and evals that are representative of the final pipeline so issues can be recognized early. Second, RL scaling: executing the final large-scale reinforcement learning run, making sure GPUs are used efficiently and training stays healthy. Third, research: improving horizontal capabilities like instruction following, factuality, memory, and multi-agent behavior, where the team’s broad visibility helps identify cross-cutting improvements across teams and domains. Fourth, engineering: maintaining the infrastructure stack and internal tools to ensure that both the final run and all integrations go as smoothly as possible and that the systems are easy to work with. About the Role This role focuses on keeping our frontier RL training runs fast, reliable, and unblocked. You will work across engineering and infrastructure problems as they emerge, from scaling and orchestration issues to inference bottlenecks, numerical problems, and hardware failures, as well as supporting large horizontal integrations in the big run, like multi-agent capabilities or memory. This is a role for a strong generalist who quickly learns anything needed for the task, has high attention to detail, debugs deeply, and is motivated by fixing the highest-impact problem in front of the team. In this role, you will: Keep large-scale async RL training runs moving by jumping into the most urgent engineering and infrastructure problems. Debug issues across training systems, inference, orchestration, scaling, and distributed infrastructure. Improve the reliability and efficiency of RL trai

About the Team Our Inference team brings OpenAI’s most capable research and technology to the world through our products. We empower consumers, enterprise and developers alike to use and access our start-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 are looking for an engineer who wants to take the world's largest and most capable AI models and optimize them for use in a high-volume, low-latency, and high-availability production and research environment. In this role, you will: Work alongside machine learning researchers, engineers, and product managers to bring our latest technologies into production. Work alongside researchers to enable advanced research through awesome engineering. Introduce new techniques, tools, and architecture that improve the performance, latency, throughput, and efficiency of our model inference stack. Build tools to give us visibility into our bottlenecks and sources of instability and then design and implement solutions to address the highest priority issues. Optimize our code and fleet of Azure VMs to utilize every FLOP and every GB of GPU RAM of our hardware. You might thrive in this role if you: Have an understanding of modern ML architectures and an intuition for how to optimize their performance, particularly for inference. Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. Have at least 5 years of professional software engineering experience. Have or can quickly gain familiarity with PyTorch, NVidia GPUs and the software stacks that optimize them (e.g. NCCL, CUDA), as well as HPC technologies such as InfiniBand, MPI, NVLink, etc. Have experience architecting, building, observing, and debugging production distributed systems. Bonus point if worked on performance-critical distributed systems. Have need

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 Future of Computing Research team is an applied research team in the Consumer Devices group focused on developing new methods and models to support our vision as we advance forward in our mission of building AGI that benefits all of humanity. About the Role As a Technical Lead on the Future of Computing Research team, you will work together with both the best ML researchers in the world and the greatest design talent of our generation to push the frontier of model capabilities. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We follow a hybrid model with 3 days a week in the office and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Evaluate and select silicon platforms (GPUs, NPUs, and specialized accelerators) for on-device and edge deployment of OpenAI models. Work closely with research teams to co-design model architectures that meet real-world deployment constraints such as latency, memory, power, and bandwidth. Analyze and model system performance, identifying tradeoffs between model design, memory hierarchy, compute throughput, and hardware capabilities. Partner with hardware vendors and internal infrastructure teams to bring up new accelerators and ensure efficient execution of transformer workloads. Build and lead a team of engineers responsible for implementing the low-level inference stack, including kernel development and runtime systems. Run through the necessary walls to take nascent research capabilities and turn them into capabilities we can build on top of. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience evaluating or deploying workloads on GPUs, NPUs, or other specialized accelerators. Understand the performance characteristics of transformer models, including attention, KV-cache behavior, and memory bandwidth requirements. Have designed or optimized high-performance compute systems, such as inference engines, distributed runtimes, or hardware-aware ML pipelines. Have experience building or leading teams work

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops system and infrastructure solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. We work closely with architecture, infrastructure, and vendor teams to evaluate system performance and guide critical design decisions. Our team focuses on building and applying performance modeling frameworks to understand system behavior, quantify tradeoffs, and inform next-generation infrastructure design. About the Role We are seeking Performance Modeling Engineers to develop and apply modeling tools that evaluate AI system performance and inform architectural decisions. In this role, you will work closely with the Performance Modeling Lead and partner teams to analyze system behavior, run simulations or analytical models, and help quantify tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, and storage. You will contribute to building modeling frameworks and applying them to real-world questions that impact system design and vendor decisions. This role is well-suited for engineers with strong software or modeling backgrounds who are interested in developing deeper expertise in system architecture and AI infrastructure. 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. Key Responsibilities Develop and maintain performance modeling tools and frameworks. Build models to evaluate system behavior across: compute, memory, and interconnect subsystems distributed system scaling and bottlenecks. Run simulations and analytical models to support architectural tradeoff analysis. Collaborate with performance modeling lead and system architects to answer forward-looking design questions. Analyze and interpret modeling outputs, translating results into actionable insights. Validate models against real system measurements and workload behavior. Contribute to improving modeling fidelity, usability, and scalability. Qualifications Strong software engineeri

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system-level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team is responsible for building the next generation of AI-native silicon while working closely with software and research partners to co-design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering production-grade silicon for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team also creates custom design tools and methodologies that accelerate innovation and enable hardware optimized specifically for AI. About the Role As an Engineer on our hardware optimization and co-design team, you will co-design future hardware from different vendors for programmability and performance. You will work with our kernel, compiler and machine learning engineers to understand their unique needs related to ML techniques, algorithms, numerical approximations, programming expressivity, and compiler optimizations. You will evangelize these constraints with various vendors to develop and influence future hardware architectures towards efficient training and inference on our models. If you are excited about efficiently distributing a large language model across devices, dealing with and optimizing system-wide/rack-wide networking bottlenecks and eventually tailoring the compute pipe and memory hierarchy of the hardware platform, simulating workloads at different abstractions and working closely with our partners, this is the perfect opportunity! 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. Key Responsibilities Co-design future hardware for programmability and performance with our hardware vendors Assist hardware vendors in developing optimal kernels and add support for it in our compiler Develop performance estimates for critical kernels for different hardware configurations and drive decisions on compute core and memory h

About the Team OpenAI's Legal team plays a crucial role in furthering OpenAI's mission by tackling innovative, fundamental legal issues in AI. If you're passionate about doing significant and unique work as a technology lawyer, this team is for you. The team comprises legal professionals from diverse fields, including technology, privacy, IP, corporate, cybersecurity, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation. About the Role We’re growing our world-class Legal team and seek an experienced counsel to lead our global hardware IP portfolio initiatives, including patent, trademark and other intellectual property matters related to our business. This role is highly cross-functional across OpenAI, including work across our Legal, Communications, Global Affairs, Product, Research and Executive teams. 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: Own global hardware IP initiatives, including setting and executing on the strategic direction and management of our hardware IP portfolio. Create scalable processes internally and externally with outside counsel to build, maintain and protect our hardware IP portfolio. Developing and maintaining internal hardware IP policies and programs. Engaging externally on hardware IP policy issues. Advising on strategic hardware IP deals. Advising on hardware IP issues, ranging from patent, trademark, trade secret to open source. Developing and building internal AI expertise, processes and tools to facilitate legal team work. Experience advising on complex technology transactions and inbound technology licensing. You might thrive in this role if you: Have at least 10+ years of combined hardware IP experience at innovative technology companies and law firms. Have a JD and license or qualification to practice in CA. Have a strong sense of ownership, are inquisitive and enthusiastic about technology, enjoy being con

About the Role OpenAI’s Applications organization spans rapidly growing Consumer, Enterprise, Developer, and Hardware businesses. As we scale across EMEA, APAC, and LATAM, we’re building the financial and operating model that will help our regional teams make faster, better decisions. We are hiring a senior Strategic Finance partner to help shape that work. You’ll serve as a trusted advisor to regional GMs, connecting market strategy with business performance and guiding where and how we invest. By bringing together insights across growth, revenue, OpEx, headcount, and marketing effectiveness, you’ll help leaders understand market health, set priorities, and drive measurable outcomes. You’ll create the frameworks, operating rhythms, and decision processes needed to scale our international business, while contributing to broader Strategic Finance priorities across Marketing. This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. Periodic international travel is expected. In this role, you will: Own an integrated view of OpenAI’s international performance—spanning countries, regions, and Consumer, Enterprise/API, and Developer businesses—to guide growth, resource allocation, and investment decisions. Partner with regional GMs and functional leaders to shape country strategies spanning Product, Sales, Growth and Brand Marketing, Partnerships, Communications, and Policy. Lead regional financial planning and forecasting, tracking budgets, headcount, capacity, investments, and risks against the company plan. Build and operationalize investment frameworks across markets, channels, and programs, evaluating expected returns, opportunity costs, and tradeoffs to recommend what to fund and when. Create regional and country scorecards and lead regular business reviews that track key metrics, surface risks, drive decisions, and ensure follow-through. Design decision rights and escal

About the Team Like every team at OpenAI, the Marketing team contributes to our broader mission of ensuring responsible and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence With that aim in mind, we are responsible for developing and executing strategies that drive awareness, engagement, and usage for OpenAI’s products and platform amongst our core audiences. We take a data-driven approach to understand our customers' needs and challenges, ensuring that their voices are reflected in product development and messaging. We then partner closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Comms, and Design teams to create a cohesive customer experience across all our channels. Our focus extends beyond just promoting product features; we aim to provide valuable insights and resources that help our users make the most out of AI technologies. About the Role As a Product Marketing Manager for Partner Marketing on the Hardware team, you will help shape the partnership strategy for a new product ecosystem and bring that ecosystem to market with the right partners, programs, and commercial motions. This role calls for a strategic, relationship-oriented marketer who can identify high-potential partners, understand their priorities, and turn shared opportunities into durable, high-impact go-to-market plans. You will work closely with Product, Design, Engineering, Integrated Marketing, Sales, Comms, Finance, Legal, and partner-facing teams to define how first-, second-, and third-party partners participate in our hardware ecosystem. You will lead the marketing and commercial aspects of partnerships, support joint launches, and ensure partner needs are understood internally while OpenAI’s product, brand, and customer experience standards are represented externally. This role reports into the VP of Product Marketing, Hardware, and offers a unique opportunity to build the partner marketing foundation for a new category of AI-powered devices. In this role, you will: Help craft and implement th

About the Team OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization is building the world's most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Working alongside our cloud partners, infrastructure providers, and internal engineering teams, we operate hyperscale AI campuses that support the training and deployment of frontier AI models. The Site Operations team serves as OpenAI's on-site operational presence, helping ensure campuses operate safely, efficiently, and in alignment with Industrial Compute standards. We work closely with Hardware Operations, Infrastructure Delivery, Network Operations, Security, Facilities, Construction, and our infrastructure partners to support day-to-day site execution and maintain operational readiness. As Industrial Compute continues to expand globally, Site Operations plays a critical role in ensuring each campus is prepared to support reliable AI infrastructure at scale. About the Role We are seeking a Site Operations Technician to support the daily operation of Industrial Compute campuses. This role acts as OpenAI's on-site technical representative, helping coordinate activities across hardware operations, facilities, construction, logistics, security, and external service providers. You will perform routine site inspections, support asset tracking, coordinate vendor activities, assist with operational readiness, document site conditions, and help ensure infrastructure issues are identified and resolved quickly. The ideal candidate enjoys working in highly technical environments, is detail-oriented, and thrives in fast-paced operational settings where no two days are the same. Key Responsibilities Perform routine walkthroughs of Industrial Compute facilities to verify operational readiness and identify potential issues. Monitor site conditions and report abnormalities involving hardware spaces, network rooms, utilities, logistics areas, and common infrastructure. Support coordination of vendors, contractors, and partner organizations performing work o

About the Team The HR Business Partner (HRBP) team at OpenAI helps shape how our organization operates and performs. We work alongside senior leaders and their teams to design effective organizations, strengthen leadership capabilities, and help people do their best work. Our expertise spans leadership coaching, organizational design, talent strategy, employee relations, and change management. Our work is grounded in a deep understanding of OpenAI’s Contributions & Impact (C&I) culture and the needs of teams working at the frontier of AI and hardware. We operate with urgency, empathy, and sound judgment. We value sincerity over polish, collaboration over ego, and a relentless focus on meaningful impact. About the Role We’re looking for an experienced HR Business Partner to support OpenAI’s Consumer Device's team. This is an opportunity to partner closely with leaders and teams doing highly ambitious, multidisciplinary work. You’ll serve as a trusted advisor as the organization builds, collaborates, and evolves—helping create the conditions for people and teams to perform at their best. The role combines strategic advising with hands-on partnership. You’ll help leaders think through organizational questions, coach managers through complex situations, strengthen people practices, and make thoughtful trade-offs that balance the needs of our people, teams, and mission. This is an individual contributor role. Come build with us. Your Key Responsibilities Shape high-performing, resilient teams: Partner with leaders on organizational design, talent planning, and ways of working that support strong performance and sustainable teams. Advise with context and judgment: Develop a deep understanding of the organization and provide thoughtful guidance on people, leadership, and organizational matters. Collaborate across OpenAI: Work closely with fellow HRBPs, People centers of excellence, and cross-functional partners to create a cohesive employee experience rooted in hum

About the Team The compute infrastructure team runs the GPU fleet and large-scale compute clusters that serve the models backing ChatGPT and the API, while also supporting training workloads for our next generation models. We operate a large, modern GPU fleet and provide a unified platform for other OpenAI teams to seamlessly run production Applied AI and Research training workloads. 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 You will be part of an engineer-first TPM team as a Technical Program Manager for Compute Infrastructure who owns the end-to-end delivery of large-scale GPU clusters, partnering with engineers to bring clusters online across external providers and partners. You’ll run a broad, parallel portfolio spanning hardware, networking, power, and cooling—driving execution, risk management, and crisp alignment from working teams through leadership to deliver production-ready capacity at scale. 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: Lead end-to-end delivery of both New Compute SKUs and large-scale GPU clusters across an external partner ecosystem while supporting capacity planning for training and inference. Ability to contextually drive multi-threaded bring-up programs spanning hardware, networking, power, and cooling—owning plans, dependencies, and critical paths. Interface with chip providers to derisk long-term onboarding to new hardware platforms by working across kernels, comms, hardware, and scheduling engineering teams. Build and operationalize program mechanisms (roadmaps, milestones, risk registers, runbooks) that make delivery predictable at massive scale. Partner with engineering to improve cluster turn-up reliability, repeatability, and automation

About the Team OpenAI is building the infrastructure foundation for the next generation of AI. The Data Center Engineering team defines the strategy, reference architectures, technical requirements, and delivery standards for the large-scale data centers that support OpenAI research, products, and infrastructure partners. As a Data Center Infrastructure Engineering Program Manager, you will help turn complex infrastructure strategy into executable programs across electrical, mechanical, controls, network, hardware, construction, commissioning, deployment, and operations workstreams. You will partner with research, hardware engineering, data center engineering, site development, supply chain, security, EHS, finance, legal, operations, and external delivery partners to bring OpenAI's infrastructure vision to life. About the Role We are looking for an Engineering Program Manager (EPM) to lead assigned infrastructure programs focused on production and non-production network integration, controls coordination, and the design and deployment of data hall or whitespace facilities. The EPM will support functional Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs) across network, controls, structural, electrical, and mechanical disciplines. Key responsibilities include coordinating assigned workstreams and program controls, maintaining risks and interfaces, and supporting readiness within the network and data hall deployment track. The ideal candidate thrives on bringing structure to complex environments characterized by ambiguous technical requirements, large partner ecosystems, tight deadlines, and high operational stakes. This individual must be adept at keeping teams aligned on decisions, risks, dependencies, schedules, and readiness criteria, and escalating gaps or decision points when needed. Candidates should have a proven track record of managing technically challenging engineering programs across major lifecycle phases, including design, validation, procurement, construction, c