Performance And Systems Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products (such as ChatGPT & Codex) that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide. The Applied Foundations team owns the core product and platform layers that make those experiences possible — from identity & access, to safety to payments & commerce across all of our apps. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to deliver technology that is reliable, secure, and trusted at global scale. About the Role We’re hiring Backend Software Engineers to design and implement safe services and infrastructure that power our core products. What You’ll Do Architect, build, and improve scalable backend systems and APIs. Drive performance, reliability, and safety across distributed services. Implement data storage, retrieval, compute, and integration solutions. Participate in long-term architectural planning and technical design reviews. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience. You Might Thrive Here If You: Have strong experience with distributed systems, APIs, and backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, C++). Have experience setting up and maintaining production backend services and data pipelines. Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed. Enjoy building resilient services that handle large scale and complexity. Are self-directed and enjoy figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. 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

About the Team The Storage Infrastructure team builds and operates the storage foundation behind OpenAI’s most demanding workloads. We work directly with research to design storage systems for rapidly evolving experiments, while also powering production at scale. We own the platform end to end: backend systems, user-facing services and APIs, and the control planes that manage how data is placed, moved, and retained over time. Our stack spans cloud and in-house object stores across very different workload profiles, from GPU-attached systems to dedicated storage hardware. We also build the federation layer that unifies these backends behind a simple interface and routes each workload to the right storage solution. About the Role You will help build the storage platform that powers OpenAI’s research and production systems. This is a hands-on infrastructure role for engineers who want to work on deeply technical systems at scale and own them in production. You’ll work across object storage, cross-region data movement, lifecycle management, and the federation layer that provides a unified interface across multiple backends. Much of our stack runs on Kubernetes, and we primarily build services in Rust. In this role, you will: Build and operate storage services that underpin OpenAI’s research infrastructure Develop object storage systems across cloud and in-house environments Build systems for cross-region data movement, replication, and recovery Design lifecycle management capabilities that keep data durable, available, and cost-effective Evolve the federation layer that unifies multiple backend systems behind a simple interface Improve performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platform Collaborate closely with researchers and infrastructure teams to support rapidly evolving workloads You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience building or operating distributed systems in production Have worked on storage infrastructure, object stores, dist

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 Notion's Search & Context Platform is the substrate that powers how 100M+ users and, increasingly, Notion's agents find and reason over the right information. This team owns the search infrastructure and indexing systems powering lexical and semantic retrieval, the platform primitives for managing agent context and memories , and the scalability, performance, security, and enterprise capabilities that make all of it production-grade. Data growth is faster than ever, and the systems that power this need to rapidly evolve to support an order of magnitude growth—both in the volume of content we index and in the load that agents now place on the retrieval layer. As the Engineering Manager for this team, you'll lead a technically deep group of engineers building platform systems used by multiple product teams. Your most important customers are the Search & Context product team and the AI team (building agents on top of these primitives). You'll set the technical direction, product manage the platform scope on behalf of those customers, and make hard tradeoffs to move fast in service of product velocity — while keepi

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 Industrial Compute 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, engineering teams, and operations staff to ensure that every component is delivered ready for installation, startup, and long-term service. About the Role We are seeking an experienced Quality Engineer (QE) to drive Product and Site Quality initiatives across OpenAI’s infrastructure ecosystem. In this role, you will establish, implement, and manage a comprehensive, quality-focused program across our global supply chain network, ensuring excellence from design through deployment. You will be responsible for end-to-end quality of finished products, as well as maintaining and elevating manufacturing site quality standards. Working cross-functionally with Design (NPI) and Engineering teams, you will help achieve First Pass Yield (FPY), quality, and reliability targets. This includes leading site and fixture validation efforts, driving yield improvement initiatives (Yield Bridge, CPI), and implementing robust corrective and preventive actions (CAPA) to resolve issues at their root cause. In addition, you will play a key role in supplier quality management, assessing and qualifying new vendors, overseeing ongoing supplier performance, and ensuring readiness for future business awards. You will lead vendor audits, monitor key performance metrics, and coordinate corrective actions to ensure predictable delivery schedules, reduced operational risk, and high system reliability. By partnering closely with external suppliers and internal Engineering and Operations stakeholders, you will help ensure OpenAI’s datacenter infrastructure is delivered on time, meets the highest quality standa

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. In this role you will: As a Hardware Test Engineer, you will work on Machine Learning/AI hardware system projects to craft the solutions for current and future data center deployments. You will bring a strong understanding of hardware system testing, excellent project management skills, and the ability to collaborate across multiple teams to ensure efficient lab operations. You will be responsible for designing, implementing, and executing comprehensive test plans that ensure the reliability, performance, and scalability of our supercomputing hardware systems. You will develop detailed test plans and methodologies tailored to hardware components, including processors, memory modules, custom accelerators and interconnects. You will collaborate with hardware design, manufacturing, firmware teams and vendors to identify, analyze, and resolve issues affecting hardware, power, thermal and high-speed interconnects. You will perform in-depth debugging on the hardware system Excellent analytical skills to diagnose hardware issues, troubleshoot problems, and propose solutions. Ability to interpret complex test data, identify trends, and draw meaningful conclusions. High-speed links, with a focus on SerDes (Serializer/Deserializer) technology to assess signal integrity, error rates, and overall link performance. You will collaborate with the lab manager to maintain the equipment and hardware systems, including oscilloscopes, thermal test chambers, liquid cooling systems, and other mea

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 You will build the model runtime within the inference engine that executes complex, frontier models at scale on OpenAI’s custom silicon. The runtime will sit between models running on the hardware and the upper layers of the cluster serving software stack, translating demanding inference workloads into efficient execution while optimizing for throughput, latency, utilization, and reliability. You will work across model architecture, distributed systems, compilers, kernels, and silicon to design a production-grade runtime comparable in ambition to systems such as vLLM and SGLang, but customized and optimized for OpenAI’s AI accelerator. Your work will shape how new model capabilities map onto the platform and how quickly custom silicon can deliver meaningful performance in production. In this role, you will: Design and implement the LLM inference runtime for frontier models running on custom silicon. Build scheduling, continuous batching, memory management, KV-cache management, and execution orchestration for high-performance inference. Develop distributed execution strategies across chips, hosts, and racks, including model partitioning, communication, and synchronization. Optimize end-to-end latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and hardware utilization across diverse model architectures and serving workloads. Partner with kernel, compiler, architecture, and silicon teams to co-design interfaces and remove performance bottlenecks across the stack. Enable new

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 Forward Deployed Engineers work directly with the largest and fastest-growing AI companies in the world, owning their technical outcomes on Baseten and taking on the hardest problems in serving and improving models at scale. The work spans the model lifecycle: inference, post-training, and the systems that tighten the loop between them. Act as each account's de facto CTO on Baseten, with final accountability for how their workloads are designed, run, and scaled. Take customer objectives from vague to shipped: frame the problem, define the spec and success criteria, build the PoC, and carry it through to production quickly, using the right tools for the problem. Design the evals and benchmarks that isolate where quality or performance falls short, then close the gap yourself, whether that means optimizing inference, improving the model through post-training, or reworking the eval itself. Be the first responder to mission-critical failures including triage, owning the fix directly or route to the owning team and stay accountable until it ships. Build internal systems so that each engagement is faster than the last. This includes tooling and automation for eval and deployment infrastructure, and the recipes and reference implementations that make the product more self-serve. Shape the product itself, channeling what your accounts need into the roadmap and shipping fixes and features into Baseten's codebase yourse

About the Role The Mechanical Commissioning Project Engineer owns mechanical commissioning planning, readiness, quality coordination, and test execution oversight for the project. This role ensures mechanical systems are installed, inspected, started, balanced, controlled, and tested in a way that supports reliable integrated facility performance. Reports to the Commissioning Project Lead and partners closely with mechanical contractors, equipment vendors, design/engineering teams, the electrical commissioning lead, controls stakeholders, and vendor field/test engineers. Key Responsibilities Develop and maintain the mechanical commissioning scope, readiness criteria, inspection strategy, and discipline test execution plan. Review mechanical design packages, specifications, submittals, method statements, controls narratives, sequence assumptions, and testing requirements for commissionability and risk. Coordinate mechanical QA/QC inspections with contractors and vendor field/test engineers, including installation checks, pre-functional readiness, deficiency capture, and closeout tracking. Own mechanical commissioning procedure development and review, including equipment startup, functional testing, controls verification, balancing prerequisites, failure mode validation, and integrated systems testing inputs. Coordinate with equipment vendors on factory/site acceptance requirements, startup support, test prerequisites, documentation packages, and vendor participation during critical tests. Support readiness and execution for cooling, ventilation, hydronic, pumping, heat rejection, controls, and other project-specific mechanical systems. Lead discipline-level review of mechanical test results, deficiencies, corrective actions, retest requirements, trend logs, and acceptance evidence. Maintain mechanical commissioning dashboards and status inputs for the Commissioning Project Lead, including risk items, resource needs, test readiness, and issue aging. Partner with the E

The Fleet team at OpenAI supports the computing environment that powers our cutting-edge research and product development. We oversee large-scale systems that span data centers, GPUs, networking, and more, ensuring high availability, performance, and efficiency. Our work enables OpenAI’s models to operate seamlessly at scale, supporting both internal research and external products like ChatGPT. We prioritize safety, reliability, and responsible AI deployment over unchecked growth. About the Role The Software Engineer, Operating Systems & Orchestration will focus on building systems to manage hardware, configurations, vendors, and the people interacting with our infrastructure. You will design and develop solutions that integrate individual nodes and servers into unified clusters, directly contributing to advancing AI research by streamlining the overall research user experience. 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: Design and build systems to manage both cloud and bare-metal fleets at scale. Develop tools that integrate low-level hardware metrics with high-level job scheduling and cluster management algorithms. Leverage LLMs to coordinate vendor operations and optimize infrastructure workflows. Automate infrastructure processes, reducing repetitive toil and improving system reliability. Collaborate with hardware, infrastructure, and research teams to ensure seamless integration across the stack. Continuously improve tools, automation, processes, and documentation to enhance operational efficiency. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong software engineering skills with experience in large-scale infrastructure environments. Possess broad knowledge of cluster-level systems (e.g., Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, cloud providers). Have deep expertise in server-level systems (e.g., systems, containerization, Chef,

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 Industrial Compute 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, engineering teams, and operations staff to ensure that every component is delivered ready for installation, startup, and long-term service. About the Role We are seeking an experienced Quality Engineer (QE) to drive Product and Site Quality initiatives across OpenAI’s infrastructure ecosystem. In this role, you will establish, implement, and manage a comprehensive, quality-focused program across our global supply chain network, ensuring excellence from design through deployment. You will be responsible for end-to-end quality of finished products, as well as maintaining and elevating manufacturing site quality standards. Working cross-functionally with Design (NPI) and Engineering teams, you will help achieve First Pass Yield (FPY), quality, and reliability targets. This includes leading site and fixture validation efforts, driving yield improvement initiatives (Yield Bridge, CPI), and implementing robust corrective and preventive actions (CAPA) to resolve issues at their root cause. In addition, you will play a key role in supplier quality management, assessing and qualifying new vendors, overseeing ongoing supplier performance, and ensuring readiness for future business awards. You will lead vendor audits, monitor key performance metrics, and coordinate corrective actions to ensure predictable delivery schedules, reduced operational risk, and high system reliability. By partnering closely with external suppliers and internal Engineering and Operations stakeholders, you will help ensure OpenAI’s datacenter infrastructure is delivered on time, meets the highest quality standa

About the Team The Software Engineering team is responsible for designing and building the scalable, performant, and secure backend systems that power our products—from early prototypes to large-scale deployments. We collaborate closely with product, hardware, and full-stack teams to ensure our infrastructure enables fast iteration while setting a strong foundation for long-term growth. About the Role As a Backend Engineer , you will design and build services, APIs, and infrastructure that support evolving product needs. You’ll apply a deep understanding of backend systems and maintain enough end-to-end context—from hardware to cloud—to guide technical decisions that best serve the product and team. We’re looking for engineers who thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments and care deeply about building robust systems that scale. 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: Architect, build, and maintain high-performance, secure backend systems. Design APIs, data models, and infrastructure to support evolving product needs. Balance near-term development velocity with long-term maintainability and scalability. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure cohesive, end-to-end solutions. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on backend systems. Have a proven track record of building and scaling systems from early stage to large scale. Are proficient with Python and Go, and familiar with a range of server-side technologies. Have a strong grasp of system design, performance optimization, and security best practices. Can reason about full-stack tradeoffs from hardware through cloud infrastructure. (Nice to have) Have experience with distributed systems and cloud architectures. (Nice to have) Bring a background in instrumentation, analytics, and performanc

OpenAI’s charter calls on us to ensure the benefits of AI are distributed broadly and safely. Our Health AI team focuses on expanding access to high-quality medical expertise and aims to set a high standard for deploying AI responsibly in high-stakes domains. Improving health will be one of the defining impacts of AGI. Today, millions of people lack access to reliable medical information, and clinicians around the world face increasing time and resource constraints. We are building AI systems that support patients, clinicians, and health workers, while meeting the highest standards for safety, reliability, and privacy. We are seeking full stack software engineers to help build and scale products used by consumers and care providers globally. You will work closely with product, design, and research teams to ship real systems in a fast-moving, high-impact environment. In this role, you will: Design and build scalable fullstack systems for consumer and enterprise health. Own end-to-end feature development—from early design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and iteration. Build and maintain data pipelines and services that meet strict privacy, security, and compliance requirements (e.g., HIPAA). Collaborate closely with researchers and safety teams to integrate reliability, evaluation, and guardrails into production systems. Debug, optimize, and harden systems to support high availability, performance, and global scale. Take ownership of ambiguous problems and drive them to practical, high-quality solutions. You might thrive in this role if you: Are deeply motivated by improving health outcomes and expanding access to medical expertise. Are a strong engineer who enjoys building durable, well-designed systems. Have 5+ years of experience writing maintainable, production-quality code. Can operate with high agency—owning problems end-to-end with minimal supervision. Enjoy working in fast-moving, cross-functional teams with engineers, product managers, desi

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 are seeking an Electrical Engineer to build and own the electrical backbone of our robotic actuator dynamometer and test infrastructure. You will design, integrate, and operate the load motor drives, power distribution, instrumentation wiring, DAQ interfaces, and safety systems that make high-performance robotic actuator testing repeatable, safe, and scalable. This role spans hands-on lab execution and system architecture: selecting and commissioning power electronics, designing robust test-cell electrical systems, bringing up sensors and DAQ, and partnering with mechanical and software engineers to turn robotic actuator hardware into trustworthy data. In this role, you will Own the electrical architecture of dynamometer and actuator test cells, from mains distribution and protection through load motor drives, braking, and auxiliary power. Specify, integrate, commission, and tune motor drives and load machines for robotic actuator torque, speed, efficiency, thermal, and durability testing. Design power distribution, grounding, shielding, cable routing, and connectorization for high-current, high-voltage, and low-level measurement systems. Integrate torque, position, speed, temperature, voltage, current, vibration, and other instrumentation from robotic actuators into DAQ and control systems. Develop electrical schematics, wiring diagrams, panel layouts, harness documentation, and test-cell interface definitions. Build, debug, and maintain test-cell electrical hardware, rapidly diagnosing noise, EMI, grounding, drive, sensor, and power-q

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 are seeking a Senior Mechanical Engineer to lead the design, integration, and sustaining engineering of mechanical subsystems in robotic platforms. You will work closely with experienced engineers and cross-functional partners to set functional requirements, develop and iterate on hardware to meet program expectations. This role is aimed at candidates with strong fundamentals in mechanical system design — including tolerance, alignment, load paths, wear, and failure modes — and robotics. You will contribute to real hardware programs moving from prototype through early production. You will lead both new subsystem development and ongoing improvements to existing systems based on testing, field performance, and manufacturing feedback. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Lead the design and iteration of mechanical subsystems, including structures, mechanisms, and actuators. Create and maintain CAD models, assemblies, and drawings with appropriate tolerancing and documentation. Build and test prototypes, supporting debugging of mechanical issues such as fit, alignment, friction, and wear. Assist in developing test methods and executing validation to evaluate performance, durability, and failure modes. Work with cross-functional teams to integrate mechanical components with sensors, actuators, and control systems. Support transition of designs from prototype to manufacturable assemblies, incorporating DFM and DFA considerations. Collaborate with manufacturing partners

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 are seeking a Mechanical Engineer to design and prototype novel tactile, proprioceptive and force sensor solutions. You will work closely with experienced engineers and cross-functional partners to set functional requirements, develop and iterate on hardware to meet program expectations. This role is aimed at candidates with strong fundamentals in mechanical system design and robotic sensing including tactile sensors, force sensing and position sensing. You will contribute to real hardware programs moving from prototype through early production. You will lead both new sensor subsystem development and ongoing improvements to existing systems based on testing, field performance, and manufacturing feedback. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Lead the design and iteration of mechanical subsystems, including tactile sensors, load cells, force torque sensors and joint encoders. Create and maintain CAD models, assemblies, and drawings with appropriate tolerancing and documentation. Build and test prototypes, supporting debugging of mechanical issues such as fit, alignment, friction, and wear. Assist in developing test methods and executing validation to evaluate performance, durability, calibration and failure modes. Work with cross-functional teams to integrate mechanical components with sensors, actuators, and control systems. Support transition of designs from prototype to manufacturable assemblies, incorporating DFM and DFA considerations. Collaborate with manufact