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Inference Technical Lead in San Francisco

268 active opportunities · Updated October 2026

Explore current inference technical lead jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Strategic Finance team partners across OpenAI to turn company strategy into financial decisions, helping allocate resources and steer the business toward its highest-impact long-term outcomes. Within Strategic Finance, the B2B Product Finance team owns the financial perspective on growth across OpenAI’s B2B portfolio. We connect monetization and customer economics with compute demand, capacity, margin, and resource planning, partnering closely with Product, GTM, Strategic Deal Desk, Compute Finance, Capacity Planning, Data, Accounting, and other Finance teams. About the Role We are hiring a Strategic Finance leader for B2B Product to build the 0→1 financial foundations and decision-making frameworks that will help OpenAI scale its B2B business sustainably. You will own high-impact work across B2B monetization, compute demand modeling, enterprise deal economics, contribution margin, and more. This is a portfolio-wide individual contributor role spanning our API Platform and other B2B products. You will connect customer demand and commercial terms to revenue, compute consumption, and margin outcomes; influence some of our largest enterprise deals; and help leadership make sound growth investment, compute capacity, and resource allocation decisions. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. In this role, you will: Own an integrated view of B2B monetization and product economics across the API Platform and other B2B products – including pricing, packaging, channel and usage mix, discounts, credits, commitments, revenue, and customer profitability Build, maintain, and improve complex driver-based financial models that connect customer usage, product and model mix, pricing, discounting, credits, commitments, and contribution margin Build financial views for B2B compute demand and margin planning; identify risks and opportunities, explain key drivers, and recommend capacity and resourcing decisions that improve portfolio economics Evaluate some of OpenAI’

SQLAWSRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The International Strategy & Operations team supports the growth and management of OpenAI’s business outside the United States. We work across products, markets, and functions to ensure our technology reaches and benefits users and customers around the world. Our team is responsible for being the glue between global and regional teams—bringing together market performance, local context, and cross-functional priorities to create a clear plan for winning in international markets. We advocate for the regional leaders closest to our users and customers, while giving company leadership the ground truth and structured recommendations needed to make the right decisions and tradeoffs. About the Role We are looking for a world-class, scrappy, and dynamic strategy and operations leader who spikes in analytical thinking, business judgment, executive communication, and operational execution. You will work closely with global leadership, regional general managers, and cross-functional partners to identify growth opportunities, build operating plans, and drive high-priority initiatives from conception through execution. You will be expected to operate at all altitudes—from translating complex market dynamics into clear recommendations for senior executives to working directly with product, growth, data science, and go-to-market teams to unblock execution. Success in this role requires the ability to bring structure to ambiguity, turn data into actionable insights, influence without authority, and drive meaningful business outcomes across a fast-moving and increasingly global organization. In this role, you will: Build the operating plan. Translate strategic priorities into clear goals, workstreams, owners, milestones, and decisions. Identify cross-functional dependencies early and ensure teams remain aligned on execution. Drive market growth initiatives. Work with product, growth, marketing, data science, and regional teams to identify and execute opportunities

SQLAWSRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team OpenAI Finance helps ensure the organization is positioned for long-term success as we pursue our mission. The Strategic Sourcing & Procurement team enables OpenAI to scale responsibly, securely, and at speed by helping teams choose the right external partners, structure strong commercial agreements, and build resilient supplier ecosystems. We work at the intersection of innovation and execution, partnering closely with leaders across the company to turn rapidly evolving needs into scalable, compliant, and economically sound solutions. Professional services are a critical source of specialized expertise, capacity, and operational leverage across OpenAI. Our work spans consulting and advisory services, finance and accounting, legal, people and talent, managed services, and other enterprise capabilities. Done well, sourcing becomes a source of trust and momentum—helping teams move faster with the right partners, clearer outcomes, stronger economics, and appropriate safeguards. About the Role We are seeking a Strategic Sourcing Lead to own and execute OpenAI’s category strategy for Professional Services. This is an experienced individual-contributor role for a high-velocity, hands-on sourcing operator who can set category priorities, own complex work end to end, exercise sound judgment, influence senior stakeholders, and build scalable category mechanisms in a rapidly growing organization. You will turn incomplete information, shifting priorities, and unclear decision paths into practical next steps and disciplined execution. You will manage a broad portfolio of services engagements—from strategic advisory relationships and enterprise programs to high-volume statements of work. Partnering directly with leaders across Finance, Accounting, Legal, People, Extended Workforce, and business teams, you will set category priorities and translate needs into clear sourcing strategies, executable engagement models, and measurable outcomes. You will operate inde

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The CoT Monitorability team at OpenAI studies whether and when the chain-of-thought of frontier reasoning models is monitorable enough to support scalable oversight. We study how to measure monitorability , which training mechanisms affect monitorability, and speculative methods to improve monitorability. While we mostly focus on CoT monitorability at the moment, we care more generally about any form of monitorability, auditing methods, and improving alignment. We were the first to show that chain-of-thought monitoring can be a practical additional safety mechanism, and today our monitoring systems are actively used on OpenAI’s largest RL training runs to detect misbehavior. The issues we surface are then used to help improve our reward functions, environments, etc (without directly training against a CoT monitor). Our work sits in Alignment and intersects with model training, alignment evaluations, monitoring, and frontier-risk research.We care most about monitorability where the stakes are high, and about preserving useful oversight signals as models become more capable. About the Role We’re looking for a researcher with strong empirical ML expertise and a deep interest in model behavior, alignment, or interpretability. Direct chain-of-thought interpretability experience is welcome but not required; strong candidates may come from broader interpretability, alignment, model training, or investigative model-behavior work. As a researcher on the Alignment team, you will design and run experiments that improve our understanding of model monitorability. You will investigate how training interventions across the model-development pipeline influence whether reasoning remains legible, build evaluations that make those questions measurable, and help translate findings into practical oversight and training recommendations. You may also help develop new monitoring models or methods and apply them to OpenAI’s largest training runs. This role is especially well

AWSRestAIRust
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team Our 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 people's lives. About the Role We are seeking a lead thermal simulation engineer to help accelerate the design and development of next-generation robotic systems through modeling, simulation, and analysis. You will work closely with mechanical, electrical, controls, and robotics engineers to evaluate designs before hardware is built, identify risks early, and guide critical architecture decisions. This role spans structural and thermal analysis and design across robotic subsystems including actuators, mechanisms, structures, electronics, and integrated systems. You will develop simulation workflows that improve engineering velocity, increase confidence in design decisions, and help us build more capable, reliable, and manufacturable robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. This role will be expected to be in office 4 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Perform thermal simulations to assess heat generation, cooling strategies, thermal interfaces, and system-level thermal performance Partner with mechanical, electrical, and controls engineers to influence design decisions early in development Build simulation models to evaluate robotic actuators, transmissions, mechanisms, structures, soft goods, and integrated assemblies Correlate simulation results with physical testing and develop methodologies to improve model accuracy Support architecture trade studies by evaluating design concepts before hardware is built Develop simulation workflows, standards, and best practices that scale across the robotics o

AWSGitRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Role We're looking for a Head of Competitive Intelligence to build and lead a world-class competitive intelligence function. This person will transform market signals into strategic advantage by developing the frameworks, analysis, and insights that inform our product strategy, go-to-market approach, and executive decision-making. This is not a research role. It's a highly cross-functional strategy role that sits at the intersection of Product, GTM, Research, and Leadership. You'll establish the systems, operating cadence, and analytical rigor that help the company understand where we win, where we're vulnerable, and how the market is evolving. What You'll Do Build and own the company's competitive intelligence strategy and operating model. Develop and maintain comprehensive competitive assessments, including Harvey Ball analyses, feature matrices, product comparisons, pricing analyses, and market landscape reviews. Create executive-ready competitive insights that influence product strategy, roadmap prioritization, pricing, and investment decisions. Build best-in-class objection handling and competitive messaging for Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Partnerships. Monitor competitor product launches, model releases, acquisitions, partnerships, pricing changes, funding, and GTM motions, synthesizing complex information into clear strategic recommendations. Establish repeatable processes and tooling for collecting, validating, and distributing competitive intelligence across the company. Partner closely with Product Management to inform roadmap decisions and identify areas of strategic differentiation. Collaborate with Marketing to sharpen positioning and messaging based on competitive dynamics. Support executive leadership with board-ready competitive analyses and market briefings. Build dashboards and reporting that track competitive movements and emerging industry trends. Develop frameworks that evaluate competitors across capabilities, enterprise r

AWSRestMachine LearningAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team Frontier Systems Foundations, part of Compute Foundations at OpenAI, builds the systems software foundation that turns new compute infrastructure into reliable, usable capacity for frontier model training. Our mission is to make some of the world's largest GPU clusters work reliably for frontier training. We bring new platforms and clusters online, safely maintain installed fleets, and partner with hardware, infrastructure, and research teams to resolve the system-level issues that keep jobs from running. That means building and maintaining the software closest to the machine: Linux and Ubuntu operating-system images, kernels and modules, drivers, packages and repositories, disks and boot configuration, firmware integration, provisioning, and system-level validation. We make these components reproducible, compatible, and safe to operate across heterogeneous fleets. About the Role We are looking for systems software engineers with deep Linux and host-systems experience to build, qualify, and maintain the operating-system foundation for OpenAI's frontier compute fleet. Relevant backgrounds include kernel and module development, Linux distribution or image engineering, package management, firmware and driver integration, disks and boot, and bare-metal provisioning. You'll work closely with hardware engineers, vendors, and infrastructure teams to bring up new platforms, integrate system components, and debug failures across firmware, disks, boot, operating systems, kernels, drivers, and workload interactions. Your work will directly influence how quickly new capacity becomes usable and how reliably large GPU fleets operate. You should be comfortable writing and maintaining production-quality systems software and automation, but we do not expect expertise across every layer. This is an opportunity to go deep on challenging systems problems while building the image, package, qualification, and recovery paths that power the next generation of frontier models

AWSLinuxRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team OpenAI’s Financial Engineering (FinEng) team powers how revenue flows through our products—pricing & packaging, checkout, payments, subscriptions, and the financial infrastructure behind them. We partner with Product, Engineering, Risk, Finance, and Go-to-Market to make paying for OpenAI products seamless, reliable, and efficient worldwide. About the Role As a Data Scientist on FinEng, you’ll own the analytics and experimentation that improve our checkout and payments , subscriptions , and pricing & monetization systems. You’ll define the metrics that matter, build the source-of-truth data assets, and design experiments that increase conversion, reduce churn and payment failures, and expand global payment method coverage. Your work will directly influence revenue, customer experience, and how we scale internationally. 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 checkout & payments analytics and experimentation across methods and locales (e.g., bank transfers, emerging rails), improving conversion while monitoring risk and latency. Build and run the experimentation program for in-house checkout—define success metrics and guardrails, execute staged rollouts, and use offline incrementality when online tests aren’t feasible. Create operational visibility and source-of-truth data with FinEng Data Engineering—land team-level metrics, SLAs, and self-serve dashboards that drive proactive action. Lead subscription, retention, and monetization analytics—ship launch-readiness for new subscription features, reduce involuntary churn (e.g., targeted retrials/nudges), and develop elasticity/FX frameworks toward pricing optimality. You might thrive in this role if you have 5+ years in a quantitative role (data science, product analytics, or experimentation) in high-growth or fintech environments Fluency in SQL and Python ,

PythonSQLAWSRest
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The team’s mission is to accelerate the secure evolution of agentic AI systems at OpenAI. To achieve this, the team designs, implements, and continuously refines security policies, frameworks, and controls that defend OpenAI’s most critical assets—including the user and customer data embedded within them—against the unique risks introduced by agentic AI. About the Role As a Security Engineer on the Agent Security Team , you will be at the forefront of securing OpenAI’s cutting-edge agentic AI systems. Your role will involve designing and implementing robust security frameworks, policies, and controls to safeguard OpenAI’s critical assets and ensure the safe deployment of agentic systems. You will develop comprehensive threat models, partner tightly with our Agent Infrastructure group to fortify the platforms that power OpenAI’s most advanced agentic systems, and lead efforts to enhance safety monitoring pipelines at scale. We are looking for a versatile engineer who thrives in ambiguity and can make meaningful contributions from day one. You should be prepared to ship solutions quickly while maintaining a high standard of quality and security. We’re looking for people who can drive innovative solutions that will set the industry standard for agent security. You will need to bring your expertise in securing complex systems and designing robust isolation strategies for emerging AI technologies, all while being mindful of usability. You will communicate effectively across various teams and functions, ensuring your solutions are scalable and robust while working collaboratively in an innovative environment. In this fast-paced setting, you will have the opportunity to solve complex security challenges, influence OpenAI’s security strategy, and play a pivotal role in advancing the safe and responsible deployment of agentic AI systems. You’ll be responsible for: Architecting security controls for agentic AI – design, implement, and iterate on identity, netwo

PythonAWSAzureGCP
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role We are seeking a Operations Program Manager (OPM) to serve as the single-threaded operational leader for new hardware introductions (NPI) and production ramps across OpenAI’s AI infrastructure systems. This role combines hands-on execution with strategic ownership. You will be responsible for defining the operating model, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, setting the critical path, making informed tradeoffs, escalating decisively, and ensuring hardware programs deliver on schedule, quality, cost, and scalability. Success in this role requires comfort operating in ambiguity, influencing without authority, and driving alignment across internal teams and external partners—while keeping eyes firmly on long-term system scalability and repeatability. In this role, you will: Strategic & Leadership Ownership Act as the single-threaded owner for operational readiness across NPI and ramp, accountable for outcomes from early bring-up through sustained production Translate OpenAI’s infrastructure strategy and engineering objectives into clear operating plans, execution priorities, and decision frameworks Drive alignment across Engineering, Operations, Strategic Sourcing, Finance, Capacity Planning, and Executive stakeholders by framing tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations Proactively identify inflection points where decisions or investments are required to protect long-term scale, reliability, or cost targets Influence operational strategy with manufacturing par

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role We’re looking for signal integrity (SI) system design engineers who have a deep expertise in the SI area, and hold strong system level design knowledge 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 system signal integrity (SI) design for AI supercomputer product in the data center application. Collaborate with chip, package, boards, rack and system engineers, design partners to drive system SI design and develop innovative interconnect and high-speed technologies Identify and evaluate new technologies and methodologies to improve signal and power integrity in product design, and contribute to the development of new products and technology by providing expertise in signal integrity Perform simulation and modeling to identify and troubleshoot signal integrity issues Lead system interconnect design, bring up and qualification As the scope of the role and team grows, understand and influence roadmaps for hardware partners for our datacenter networks, racks, and buildings. You might thrive in this role if you: Have at least 10 years of industry experience, including experience design hardware system and SerDes testing for data center applications Have a strong bias toward action, and won’t take no for an answer. Have experience and good knowledge of system design experience in the SI areas, from chip, SerDes, board, rack level Have ex

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Synthetic RL team develops reinforcement learning methods that leverage synthetic data, environments, and feedback to train and evaluate frontier AI models. The team explores approaches such as self-play, simulators, and other synthetic evaluations to push model capability, generalization, and alignment beyond what is possible with the current prevailing methodology. About the Role As a Research Scientist on the Synthetic RL team, you will develop novel reinforcement learning techniques that use synthetic environments and feedback to improve large-scale models. You’ll work closely with other researchers to design experiments, analyze learning dynamics, and translate research insights into training approaches used in production systems. We’re looking for researchers who enjoy working on open-ended problems, value fast iteration, and want their work to directly shape how frontier models are trained. 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: Research and develop reinforcement learning algorithms Design and run experiments to study training dynamics and model behavior at scale Collaborate with engineers and researchers to integrate successful approaches into model training pipelines You might thrive in this role if you: Have a strong background in reinforcement learning, machine learning research, or related fields Have strong engineering and statistical analysis skills Enjoy exploring new problem spaces where data, objectives, and evaluation are imperfect or evolving Are motivated by seeing research ideas influence real-world AI 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 ex

AWSRestMachine LearningAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -86%

$196K – $261K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

Who We Are Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together . We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. About The Role: Millions of people use Notion — and this number is increasing every day. That means millions of people trust us to deliver a fast, reliable, and secure experience, and we value this more than anything. We want to keep earning trust, while also continuing to amaze our users with the tools they can build in Notion. The Product Analytics Platform team owns the foundational systems that turn Notion's raw product signals into reliable and actionable insights at scale: how we instrument events, experiment and roll out features, define and trust metrics, and build analytics surfaces that interact with AI agents.. This is an early, high-leverage moment. You’ll join a newly formed team of talented engineers in our mission to build the best in class foundational platforms that are key to the company’s business and product. What You'll Achieve: You'll help shape a brand-new platform team and have real influence over the architecture and roadmap. You'll own critical infrastructure that spans experimentation, feature gating, event logging, schematization, governance and play a pivotal role in the development of systems, tools and

TypeScriptNode.jsCI/CDRest
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