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Performance And Systems Engineer in San Francisco

364 active opportunities · Updated October 2026

Explore current performance and systems engineer 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 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 looking for a highly experienced RTL engineer to own critical on- and off-chip interconnect components for our custom AI accelerator platform. You will drive the microarchitecture and RTL implementation of scalable on-chip communication fabrics connecting high-bandwidth compute, memory, and I/O subsystems as well as purpose-built off-chip interfaces and protocols needed to enable custom computing at scale. This is a senior, hands-on engineering role with broad technical ownership. You will drive design from requirements through the full silicon lifecycle, from architecture definition and performance analysis through RTL implementation, verification closure, physical design convergence, bring-up, and production readiness. You will plan and oversee the work of junior engineers and help drive and develop productive engineering relationships with external partners and help manage partner execution. 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 the microarchitecture, RTL design, and delivery of major SoC interconnect components, including network-on-chip fabrics, switches, routers, bridges, protocol adapters, arbiters, and traffic-management logic as well as off-chip protocol bridges and interfaces. Drive third party engagements to develop novel networking and interface protocols and silicon IP while ensuring high quality and de

AWSRestAIRust
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 On the Accelerators team, you will help OpenAI evaluate and bring up new compute platforms that can support large-scale AI training and inference. Your work will range from prototyping system software on new accelerators to enabling performance optimizations across our AI workloads. You’ll work across the stack, collaborating with both hardware and software aspects - working on kernels, sharding strategies, scaling across distributed systems, and performance modeling. You'll help adapt OpenAI's software stack to non-traditional hardware and drive efficiency improvements in core AI workloads. This is not a compiler-focused role, rather bridging ML algorithms with system performance - especially at scale. In this role, you will: Prototype and enable OpenAI's AI software stack on new, exploratory accelerator platforms. Optimize large-scale model performance (LLMs, recommender systems, distributed AI workloads) for diverse hardware environments. Develop kernels, sharding mechanisms, and system scaling strategies tailored to emerging accelerators. Collaborate on optimizations at the model code level (e.g. PyTorch) and below to enhance performance on non-traditional hardware. Perform system-level performance modeling, debug bottlenecks, and drive end-to-end optimization. Work with hardware teams and vendors to evaluate alternatives to existing platforms and adapt the software stack to their architectures. Contribute to runtime improvements, compute/communication over

AWSRestAIGo
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📍 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 As a software engineer on the Scaling team, you’ll help build and optimize the low-level stack that orchestrates computation and data movement across OpenAI’s supercomputing clusters. Your work will involve designing high-performance runtimes, building custom kernels, contributing to compiler infrastructure, and developing scalable simulation systems to validate and optimize distributed training workloads. You will work at the intersection of systems programming, ML infrastructure, and high-performance computing, helping to create both ergonomic developer APIs and highly efficient runtime systems. This means balancing ease of use and introspection with the need for stability and performance on our evolving hardware fleet. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model (3 days/week in-office). Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Design and build APIs and runtime components to orchestrate computation and data movement across heterogeneous ML workloads. Contribute to compiler infrastructure, including the development of optimizations and compiler passes to support evolving hardware. Engineer and optimize compute and data kernels, ensuring correctness, high performance, and portability across simulation and production environments. Profile and optimize system bottlenecks, especially around I/O, memory hierarchy, and interconnects, at both local and distributed scales. Develop simulation infrastructure to validate runtime b

PythonAWSRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -80.2%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

About the Team OpenAI, in partnership with our capital and technology partners, is building a global network of advanced datacenters to support the most demanding AI workloads. The Infrastructure Quality team ensures that all datacenter systems are manufactured, delivered, and commissioned to the highest standards of quality, reliability, and performance. We work closely with manufacturing partners, general contractors, engineering teams, and operations staff to ensure that every component is delivered ready for installation, startup, and long-term service. Our work spans from vendor qualification through commissioning, ensuring operational readiness across our global portfolio. About the Role We are seeking an experienced Manufacturing Quality Engineer (MQE) to establish, implement, and manage a manufacturing-focused quality program for datacenter infrastructure. This role will be responsible for vendor oversight, quality assurance, process improvement, and issue resolution for all critical systems. You will lead vendor audits, monitor performance metrics, and coordinate corrective actions to ensure predictable delivery schedules, reduced risks, and operational reliability. By partnering with vendors, construction teams, and internal stakeholders, you will help ensure OpenAI’s datacenters are delivered on time and built to the highest operational standards. Travel Domestic and international travel as needed (estimated 40–60%) to manufacturing sites, datacenter locations, and partner facilities. Key Responsibilities Vendor Oversight & Performance Management Conduct manufacturing evaluation, audits, and improve vendor performance across production, inspection, testing, and delivery phases. Develop and track quality metrics to assess manufacturing performance and identify trends. Partner with vendors to refine processes, training, and quality controls to mitigate risks before shipment. Program Development & Execution Develop and maintain a datacenter-focused m

AWSRestAIGo
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📍 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 peoples’ lives. About the Role We’re looking for a GPU Inference Engineer to contribute to improvements in model serving efficiency for our Robotics research. This is a high-impact role where you’ll drive initiatives to optimize inference performance and scalability. You’ll also be engaged in model design, to help assist our researchers in developing inference-friendly models. This role is critical to scaling the team’s broader goals - it will directly enable leadership to focus on higher-leverage initiatives by building a stronger technical foundation. In this role you will: Perform engineering efforts focused on improving model serving, inference performance, and system efficiency Drive optimizations from a kernel and data movement perspective to improve system throughput and reliability Partner closely with research and product teams to ensure our models perform effectively at scale Design, build, and improve critical serving infrastructure to support Robotics growth and reliability needs You might thrive in this role if you: Have deep expertise in model performance optimization, particularly at the inference layer Have a strong background in kernel-level systems, data movement, and low-level performance tuning Are excited about scaling high-performing AI systems that serve real-world, multimodal workloads Can navigate ambiguity, set technical direction, and drive complex initiatives to completion 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. About OpenAI OpenAI i

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

About the Team The Connectivity Software Engineering team is responsible for enabling seamless, secure, and high-performance wireless connectivity across OpenAI’s products. We design and optimize Bluetooth, BLE, Wi-Fi, and emerging wireless technologies to ensure robust device pairing, network performance, and interoperability. Our work spans kernel drivers, system services, and user-level tools, with a focus on real-world performance, scalability, and reliability. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a Connectivity Software Engineer to design, implement, and optimize wireless connectivity features across our product ecosystem. You’ll work at the intersection of systems software, wireless standards, and hardware integration—building robust pairing and provisioning flows, debugging low-level protocols, and driving performance under real-world RF constraints. You will also support certification, field interoperability, and fleet-scale connectivity infrastructure. This role is based in San Francisco, CA . We use a hybrid work model of 4 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Design, implement, and debug Bluetooth/BLE and Wi-Fi features across kernel drivers, BlueZ/wpa_supplicant/hostapd, and systemd/D-Bus services Deliver robust pairing, bonding, and provisioning flows (GATT/GAP, LE Audio/LC3, WPA3/802.1X, captive portals, NAN) Optimize link performance: throughput, latency, jitter, roaming, coexistence (BT↔Wi-Fi), and power modes (TWT, WoWLAN) Build reliable network management using NetworkManager/nmcli, nl80211/cfg80211/mac80211, DNS/DHCP/mDNS, P2P/SoftAP Instrument and analyze with packet captures and tooling (btmon/hcidump, Wireshark, iperf, eBPF/perf, spectrum sniffers) Drive interoperability and certification readiness (Bluetooth SIG, Wi-Fi Alliance) and resolve field issues with root-cause fixes Contribute to OTA-safe configuration, telemetry, and diagnostics for fleet-scale operation You might thrive in

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

About the Team The Core Network Engineering team owns the end-to-end networking stack that connects OpenAI’s compute infrastructure — spanning global WAN/edge connectivity, data-center networking, and high-performance host/xPU networking used for large-scale training and inference workloads. This team is responsible for ensuring networking is never the bottleneck to model training efficiency, cluster reliability, or fleet expansion. They design and operate the systems that provide predictable, high-throughput, low-latency connectivity across some of the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure. About the Role We’re looking for engineers to help build and operate the networking foundation behind OpenAI’s frontier AI systems. Depending on your background and area of focus, you may work across host networking, datacenter fabrics, or global WAN infrastructure. The problems span low-level systems software, distributed infrastructure, protocol readiness, observability, performance engineering, automation, and large-scale network operations. You’ll work on systems where microseconds of latency, tail performance, and network reliability directly impact model training efficiency and production serving performance. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy operating close to the hardware/software boundary and solving performance-critical infrastructure problems at massive scale. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate networking systems that support large-scale AI training and inference infrastructure Improve performance, reliability, and scalability across host networking, datacenter fabrics, and WAN systems Develop automation for provisioning, configuration management, validation, upgrades, and lifecycle management of networking infrastructure Build tooling and observability systems for network health, performance analysis, debugging, and automated remediation Optimize network performance across technologies such as RDMA, RoCE, InfiniBand, Ethernet, and high-perf

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

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 4 days onsite/week). Relocation assistance available. About the Team: We build foundational platform software that enables reliable, secure, and performant products. The team works across system layers and partners closely with adjacent engineering groups to deliver robust capabilities from concept through launch. About the Role: We’re seeking a System Software Engineer to design, implement, and debug core platform components and the pipelines that build and update system images. You’ll work across operating system layers, focusing on performance, security, and deep system debugging to ship production‑grade systems. In this role, you will: Design, implement, and debug system‑level components and services across kernel and user space. Configure and maintain OS platform services (init, services, networking, security policies) and related tooling. Build and operate image and update pipelines, ensuring reliability, reproducibility, and rollback safety. Instrument and analyze performance using profiling and tracing; optimize CPU, memory, I/O, and power usage. Own platform observability and reliability: logging, crash capture, watchdogs, and diagnostics. Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to define interfaces and deliver end‑to‑end features. Establish strong engineering practices: code review, CI, reproducible builds, and release management. Partner with external suppliers to support builds and deployments. You might thrive in this role if you: Have shipped production systems software on modern operating systems. Are proficient in C/C++ and a scripting language, and comfortable with OS internals (concurrency, memory management, filesystems, networking, power management). Bring strong systems debugging skills using debuggers, tracers, profilers, and logs across kernel/user‑space boundaries. Understand configuration of platform services and interfaces, and can translate requirements into stable, well‑documented APIs. Are fluent in u

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

About the Role We are seeking a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to help design and evolve the platforms that power OpenAI’s products. In this role, you will be a hands-on technical leader, driving the architecture, scalability, reliability, and security of critical infrastructure systems. You will help define how we build and operate infrastructure at the next order of magnitude, while influencing technical direction across teams. This role is both deeply technical and highly strategic, requiring strong ownership, sound judgment, and the ability to partner effectively across engineering, product, and research organizations. In this role, you will: Design and build scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure platforms that power OpenAI products Evolve cloud infrastructure abstractions that enable rapid product development across teams Architect systems to support significant growth, performance, and operational complexity Improve server orchestration, networking, distributed systems reliability, and infrastructure security posture Influence technical direction and infrastructure strategy across multiple teams Partner closely with product, research, and engineering teams to align infrastructure with evolving needs Own operational excellence, including participation in on-call rotations, incident response, and production readiness Mentor engineers and raise the overall technical bar of the organization Contribute to a culture of high ownership, low ego, and thoughtful collaboration You might thrive in this role if you: 8+ years of experience building and operating large-scale infrastructure systems Deep expertise in Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale Strong experience designing cloud abstractions and platform infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar) Proven track record of leading complex technical initiatives across teams Experience operating highly reliable, secure, and scalable distributed systems Security engineering experience or security backgroun

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

About the Team The Privacy Engineering Team at OpenAI is committed to integrating privacy as a foundational element in OpenAI's mission of advancing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Our focus is on all OpenAI products and systems handling user data, striving to uphold the highest standards of data privacy and security. We build essential production services, develop novel privacy-preserving techniques, and equip cross-functional engineering and research partners with the necessary tools to ensure responsible data use. Our approach to prioritizing responsible data use is integral to OpenAI's mission of safely introducing AGI that offers widespread benefits. About the Role As a part of the Privacy Engineering Team, you will work on the frontlines of safeguarding user data while ensuring the usability and efficiency of our AI systems. You will help us understand and implement the latest research in privacy-enhancing technologies such as differential privacy, federated learning, and data memorization. Moreover, you will focus on investigating the interaction between privacy and machine learning, developing innovative techniques to improve data anonymization, and preventing model inversion and membership inference attacks. This position is located in San Francisco. Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Design and prototype privacy-preserving machine-learning algorithms (e.g., differential privacy, secure aggregation, federated learning) that can be deployed at OpenAI scale. Measure and strengthen model robustness against privacy attacks such as membership inference, model inversion, and data memorization leaks—balancing utility with provable guarantees. Develop internal libraries, evaluation suites, and documentation that make cutting-edge privacy techniques accessible to engineering and research teams. Lead deep-dive investigations into the privacy–performance trade-offs of large models, publishing insights that inform model-training and prod

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

About the Team ChatGPT is a rapidly evolving system: new capabilities ship continuously, product surfaces change quickly, and usage patterns shift week-to-week. Supporting that pace requires infrastructure that can handle real production constraints—high concurrency, unpredictable traffic patterns, complex dependency graphs, and frequent change. The ChatGPT Infrastructure team builds and operates the platforms that enable fast iteration without compromising performance or reliability. We design shared systems, data paths, rollout mechanisms, and reliability guardrails that teams rely on to ship changes to ChatGPT at scale. We focus on high-leverage infrastructure: primitives and “golden paths” that incorporate operational lessons as defaults, so engineers don’t need to rediscover failure modes, latency pitfalls, or integration issues each time they build something new. About the Role We’re hiring Senior and Staff Engineers to design and build infrastructure systems that underlie ChatGPT and multiply the effectiveness of teams building user experiences. This is not a support-only role. It’s a platform-building role: you’ll define interfaces, develop core abstractions, and create tooling to make safe, fast iteration the norm. Your work will reduce friction, prevent regressions, improve performance, and ensure systems scale gracefully as the product grows. Where You Can Have Impact You might work on one or more of the following areas (without being restricted to any single area): Platform foundations & frameworks: Core libraries, service frameworks, and shared components that standardize system building, integration, and evolution. Scalability & performance primitives: Patterns and infrastructure that reduce tail latency, improve throughput, and keep costs predictable as demand increases. Reliability guardrails: Mechanisms that prevent outages by design—rate limiting, load shedding, dependency isolation, backpressure, safe fallbacks, and robust regression contr

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

About the Team The Workload Networking team is responsible for the collective communication stack used in our largest training jobs. Using a combination of C++ and CUDA we work on novel collective communication techniques that enable efficient training of our flagship models on our largest custom built supercomputers. The models we train are key ingredients to the AI research progress at OpenAI and the field as a whole, and we continually incorporate learnings from our entire research org into our training platform. About the Role As a Software Engineer, Networking you will design and implement custom networking collectives that are tightly integrated into our training stack. We’re looking for people who have a background in low level performance critical software. Experience with collective communication is a bonus. 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: Collaborate closely with ML researchers to design and implement efficient collective operations in C++ and CUDA. Ensure that our largest training jobs take full advantage of the different network transports used in our supercomputers. Work on simulations to inform our future supercomputer network designs. You might thrive in this role if you: Have written distributed algorithms using RDMA in the past. Are comfortable writing low level performance sensitive CPU and/or GPU code. Are familiar with network simulation techniques. 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 our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voic

AWSRestAIC++
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📍 San Francisco, CA, United States· Remote
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.6%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

About Pinterest: Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product. Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible. At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI. Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here . Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love. As a Pinterest employee, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. As a Principal Engineer on the AI Platform team, you'll help architect the infrastructure that powers both Generative AI and Recommender Systems across Pinterest's entire product suite. Our team builds the end-to-end engines for petabyte-scale data orchestration, model training and fine-tuning, and high-performance inference, ensuring our models scale seamlessly to hundreds of millions of inferences per second in service of over 600 million monthly active users.

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

About the Team The Stargate team is responsible for building the physical infrastructure that powers large-scale AI systems. We design and deliver next-generation data centers optimized for dense compute clusters, advanced networking, and rapidly evolving hardware platforms. This work sits at the intersection of hardware engineering, systems architecture, and infrastructure execution—translating cutting-edge compute roadmaps into scalable, production-ready environments. Our teams partner across silicon vendors, server and storage OEMs, networking teams, and data center engineering organizations to bring new capacity online quickly, reliably, and at global scale. About the Role We are seeking a CPU & Storage Technical Lead to define and drive the server compute and storage architecture strategy for Stargate infrastructure. In this role, you will own technical direction across CPU platforms, memory configurations, local and disaggregated storage systems, and their integration into large-scale AI clusters. You will evaluate vendor roadmaps, lead platform tradeoff decisions, and ensure compute and storage systems are optimized for training, inference, and supporting services. You will work cross-functionally with hardware engineering, performance modeling, networking, supply chain, and deployment teams, as well as external partners such as AMD, Intel, OEMs, ODMs, and storage vendors. This is a highly strategic role for someone who can operate deeply at the component level while also driving long-range infrastructure decisions. Key Responsibilities Own CPU and storage technical strategy for Stargate compute infrastructure across current and future generations. Evaluate CPU platforms across performance, efficiency, memory bandwidth, PCIe topology, cost, and roadmap alignment. Define storage architectures for AI environments, including boot media, local NVMe, shared storage, caching tiers, metadata services, and high-performance data pipelines. Drive server platform de

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

About the Team The Human Data team at OpenAI is responsible for identifying and mitigating risks in advanced AI systems by designing evaluations, surfacing vulnerabilities, and collaborating closely with researchers to strengthen model reliability and public trust. About the Role As a Research Program Manager, you will lead initiatives that test the safety and robustness of OpenAI’s models through creative experimentation and structured evaluation. You’ll coordinate efforts across research and engineering teams to transform ambiguous risks into concrete research programs and influence future model development and deployment. We’re looking for people who are technically savvy, comfortable with ambiguity, and excited about shaping the future of safe AI. 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 programs that explore unexpected model behaviors and identify failure modes. Translate vague or emergent risk signals into clear priorities and actionable research plans. Design and run creative evaluations, experiments, and red-teaming campaigns. Collaborate with research, product, and deployment teams to integrate findings into model training and deployment cycles. Develop repeatable systems for tracking model performance and understanding emerging behavior patterns. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong experience in technical program management, with excellent organizational and communication skills. Are familiar with large language models, prompt engineering, or model evaluation techniques. Are comfortable managing fast-paced, high-uncertainty projects and shaping them from the ground up. Are creative and resourceful in devising new methods for testing model behavior and performance. Can effectively coordinate across technical and non-technical stakeholders to drive alignment and execution. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI resear

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