Hardware Tools 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 OpenAI’s Infrastructure organization builds the systems that power frontier AI workloads at global scale. As compute demand accelerates, our ability to rapidly convert infrastructure investments into usable production capacity has become mission critical. The CPU / Storage / PoP / WAN team is responsible for the end-to-end infrastructure layers required to bring compute online: server and cluster activation, storage platforms, Points of Presence (PoPs), backbone connectivity, and global network expansion. We operate across first-party facilities, colocation environments, and strategic cloud partners to ensure OpenAI can scale reliably and quickly. About the Role We are seeking a highly technical Program Manager to lead execution across CPU, Storage, PoP, and WAN infrastructure programs that directly unlock OpenAI’s next generation compute capacity. In this role, you will own complex cross-functional programs spanning compute cluster activation, storage deployment, PoP bring-up, and backbone expansion. You will coordinate hardware readiness, site readiness, network pathing, storage availability, vendor execution, and engineering dependencies required to turn contracted infrastructure into live training and inference capacity. This role requires strong technical fluency across hardware systems, network infrastructure, storage architecture, and deployment execution. You should be comfortable operating from rack-level implementation details through executive-level capacity planning discussions. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with travel as needed. Key Responsibilities Lead end-to-end execution of CPU / GPU cluster activation programs across OpenAI’s global infrastructure footprint Drive readiness to convert contracted compute capacity into schedulable production clusters Own deployment programs for new PoPs, backbone nodes, WAN expansion, and interconnection initiatives Build integrated schedules spanning procurement, logistics, installation, st

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