Performance And Systems Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team The Codex Core Agent team builds the kernel of Codex. We own making the agent better, accelerating research, and making those improvements real in production for our users. That means working across the systems that make Codex actually function as an agent in the real world: the production performance envelope around tokens, latency, reliability, cost, and capacity; the core execution loop and interfaces that turn models into useful behavior; the shared infrastructure that enables other teams to build on Codex; and the feedback loops that turn real-world usage into better models and better agent behavior over time. About the Role We’re looking for applied AI engineers to help bring Codex agents from impressive demos to dependable tools. This role is about improving agent performance on real software engineering tasks and closing the gap between research capability and real-world usefulness. You’ll work closely with research, infrastructure, and product to ensure agents are not just powerful, but useful, steerable, and reliable in practice. The job is not only to improve model behavior in isolation, but to turn those improvements into measurable gains in solve rate, usefulness, and economic value for users. What You’ll Do Design and iterate on agent behaviors across real-world coding tasks and long-horizon workflows. Work closely with research to develop and run evals to measure agent performance, regressions, failure modes, and edge cases. Improve performance through prompting, tool-use strategies, context construction, and model-facing experimentation. Analyze failures in production and systematically improve robustness and reliability. Build feedback loops and data systems that get better real-task data into evaluation and research. Work with product teams to shape user-facing agent experiences and the interfaces the agent depends on. Help define what “good” looks like for agents completing complex tasks end-to-end. You Might Be a Good Fit If You Ha

About the Team We’re hiring software engineers to make OpenAI’s networking teams more productive. These teams build and operate the high-performance networking systems that support OpenAI’s training and inference infrastructure at frontier scale. About the Role We’re looking for someone who cares deeply about the developer experience of engineers working on complex infrastructure systems — especially around build systems, test architecture, release pipelines, and reliable development workflows. This role will be embedded with OpenAI’s networking team: making it faster, safer, and easier for engineers to build, test, validate, and ship changes across multi-server, networked, and hardware-adjacent environments. In this role you will: Improve development workflows for engineers building and operating OpenAI’s networking systems Design and improve continuous deployment, release, and validation pipelines Build and maintain test harnesses for multi-server, networked, and hardware-backed environments Improve iteration speed across C++, Python, and build-system-heavy codebases Partner with engineers to identify friction in CI, testing, debugging, and deployment workflows Drive testing and reliability strategy for infrastructure components that support large-scale training and inference workloads Work closely with centralized developer experience teams while staying deeply embedded with the networking engineers closest to the systems You might thrive in this role if: You are motivated by helping other engineers move faster and with more confidence You have experience with CI/CD, release pipelines, testing infrastructure, or build systems You are comfortable moving between C++, Python, and build systems such as CMake, Bazel, or Blaze You enjoy building test harnesses, automation, and workflow improvements for complex systems You do not need to be a networking expert, but you are excited to learn enough about the domain to make the team meaningfully more effective When you see

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE Baseten is seeking talented and experienced Software Engineers to join our Platform team within the Infrastructure organization. As a senior member of Baseten's Platform Team, you will own the systems that let every engineer at Baseten prove their code works before it reaches production. Our product runs mission-critical AI inference for customers who measure downtime in dollars per second, which means our internal bar for correctness, performance, and failure tolerance has to be exceptional. Your focus is the full testing stack: fast and reliable unit test tooling, integration harnesses that spin up realistic environments on demand, load and performance testing for GPU-backed inference workloads, and resilience testing that deliberately breaks things so our customers never have to find out what happens when a node dies mid-request. This is a builder role with org-wide leverage. You won't be writing tests for other teams — you'll be building the frameworks, harnesses, and feedback loops that make writing good tests the path of least resistance, and you'll set the standards for what "well-tested" means at Baseten. RESPONSIBILITIES Own Baseten's testing strategy end to end — define the standards, the tiers, and the tooling that engineering teams build against. Build and maintain unit, integration, load and performance testing frameworks Design end to end test infrastructure that provisions realistic dependencies

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE Baseten’s Inference Stack team builds the distributed runtime that powers large-scale LLM inference across our platform. We operate at the intersection of distributed systems, model performance, infrastructure, and developer experience. We enable customers to deploy and operate cutting-edge LLM models with industry-leading performance, scalability, reliability, and ease of use. As a Software Engineer on the Inference Stack team, you’ll work across the stack - from the developer experience customers use to deploy models, the libraries used for features like tool calling and reasoning, all the way down to the systems we use to orchestrate deployments in Kubernetes and route traffic efficiently. This is an ideal role for engineers who enjoy owning systems in production, solving hard integration problems, and making complex infrastructure simple and reliable for users. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Blog Posts https://www.baseten.co/blog/nvidia-dynamo-day-baseten-inference-stack/ https://www.baseten.co/blog/how-baseten-achieved-2x-faster-inference-with-nvidia-dynamo/ https://www.baseten.co/blog/how-baseten-multi-cloud-capacity-management-mcm-powers-cloud-self-hosted-and-hybr/#comparing-deployment-options-cloud-vs-self-hosted-vs-hybrid RESPONSIBILITIES Develop infrastructure and orchestration systems for deploying and managing large-scale distributed LLM inference Work across the stack, from customer-facing features to low-le

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. Plaid’s mission is to unlock financial freedom for everyone by making money movement and access to financial data simple and secure. As a Software Engineer, you will design and build the systems that power how millions of people connect to their finances. You will work across the stack, from reliable backend services and APIs to intuitive applications that bring those systems to life. You will collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers to ship products that make financial services more accessible and transparent. At Plaid, engineers take ownership early, grow quickly, and see their work reach millions of users. Responsibilities: System Design & Development: Build and maintain scalable, reliable backend or fullstack systems and APIs that power Plaid’s products. Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define and deliver features that solve real customer problems. Code Quality: Write clean, efficient, and well-tested code. Participate in reviews to maintain high engineering standards. Testing & Debugging: Build automated tests, monitor system performance, and troubleshoot issues in production environments. Continuous Improvement: Con

About the Team Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Identity Infrastructure Engineering team sits at the core of this effort, designing and building the identity and access management solutions that protect our model weights, customer data, and critical systems across multiple cloud environments. We partner with teams across OpenAI—Applied Engineering, Research, IT, and Security—to provide a secure and scalable platform for permissioning, orchestration, and innovative AI research. About the Role We’re looking for a Staff+ Software Engineer to help build and evolve the identity infrastructure that supports OpenAI’s research, engineering, and internal platforms. This role sits at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, identity systems, and software engineering. You’ll work across production systems, infrastructure-as-code, cloud control planes, identity providers, and operational infrastructure to build secure, scalable, and reliable systems used broadly across the company. The ideal candidate has experience building and operating large-scale, mission-critical systems with strong reliability and security requirements, and is comfortable writing production code, designing distributed systems, and driving ambiguous projects from 0 to 1 while building the operational rigor needed to run critical infrastructure over time. In this role, you will: Lead the architecture, development, and operation of identity infrastructure that spans cloud platforms, internal systems, and critical engineering services. Design and evolve systems for authentication, authorization, access governance, auditability, and policy enforcement with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and secure-by-default design. Build foundational infrastructure and platform capabilities that are broadly used across engineering, research, and security teams. Improve the reliability, observability, performance, and op

About the Team OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is embarking on a journey to build the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. This team is central to this mission, setting the core infra strategy and implementing this vision. From site selection to the buildout process, this team sits at the intersection of commercial, technical, strategy, and operations, interacting with teams and executives inside and outside of OpenAI. About the Role We are seeking experienced Data Center Mechanical and Electrical/Power Design Engineers with expertise in designing, operating, and maintaining large-scale data center campuses. The ideal candidate for this role will have extensive background and experience in design and managing critical equipment and facilities, design and operation of MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing) systems, and overseeing operational activities from initial phases of Data Center build through delivery and ongoing maintenance. The ideal candidate will have a strong technical background, operational leadership experience, and a proven ability to collaborate with external vendors on critical infrastructure. This role offers the opportunity to lead transformative data center projects with high visibility and impact. If you are passionate about delivering cutting-edge infrastructure solutions, we encourage you to apply. Key Responsibilities Oversee building and MEP design, operation, and maintenance, including reviewing building and MEP drawings and proposals across all project phases. Lead operational activities for large-scale data center campuses, from early design phases through delivery and daily operation. Operate and maintain critical data center facilities and equipment, ensuring reliability and performance. Collaborate with external vendors to select, procure, and manage critical equipment, such as generators, UPS, chillers, and CDUs. Provide technical expertise on all aspects of data center building, equipment, and

About the Team The Codex Core Agent team builds the kernel of Codex. We own making the agent better, accelerating research, and making those improvements real in production for our users. That means working across the systems that make Codex actually function as an agent in the real world: the production performance envelope around tokens, latency, reliability, cost, and capacity; the core execution loop and interfaces that turn models into useful behavior; the shared infrastructure that enables other teams to build on Codex; and the feedback loops that turn real-world usage into better models and better agent behavior over time. About the Role We’re looking for engineers to build the infrastructure that powers Codex agents in production. This role focuses on the systems that let models safely execute code, interact with tools, complete long-running tasks, and operate reliably and efficiently at scale. You’ll design and operate the infrastructure behind sandboxed execution, orchestration, stateful workflows, app-server and SDK boundaries, and model rollouts. You’ll work at the intersection of distributed systems, developer tooling, and AI, building primitives that make Codex faster, safer, more reliable, and easier for the rest of the organization to build on. What You’ll Do Design and build execution environments for AI agents, including sandboxing, isolation, and reproducibility. Develop systems for agent orchestration across multi-step, tool-using workflows. Build infrastructure for running, testing, and debugging code generated by models. Create state and memory systems that allow agents to persist context across long-running tasks. Optimize tokens, latency, reliability, and cost across Codex’s production fleet. Support model rollouts, capacity planning, and the core tradeoffs between quality, speed, and economics to manage a fleet of frontier agents at scale. Build shared platform capabilities that unblock product teams, partner teams, and open source Codex. Yo

About the Team Compute Foundations builds the software that manages OpenAI’s GPU compute infrastructure across sites, data centers, and infrastructure providers, supporting model training and inference. Our systems turn large, heterogeneous fleets of machines into dependable compute for research and products. We build Kubernetes-based control planes, controllers, services, and APIs that coordinate the lifecycle of machines and clusters. We connect global infrastructure management with the realities of bare-metal systems, giving clients consistent interfaces across differences in hardware, topology, and provider behavior. About the Role You will build distributed systems that provision, configure, and manage compute throughout its lifecycle. Your work will connect global services and Kubernetes controllers with the systems that bring machines online, update them safely, and recover them when something goes wrong. This role combines software architecture with an understanding of how machines and data centers work. You might design a lifecycle API, improve controller performance under high concurrency and provider rate limits, or trace a provisioning failure from an API through reconciliation to network boot or host configuration. You will help these systems remain reliable as the fleet expands across sites and generations of GPU hardware. We value depth in relevant systems and the ability to connect layers. You do not need to arrive as an expert in every component of the stack. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate Kubernetes-based controllers and distributed services that coordinate infrastructure across sites, isolate failures, and scale as GPU capacity grows. Define APIs and resource models that let clients request and track lifecycle operations through consistent interfaces across hardware platforms and providers. Build provisioning and configuration services that coordinate network boot, hardware management interfaces, and the deployment of firmware,

Overview: The Data Acquisition team within the Foundations organization at OpenAI is responsible for all aspects of data collection to support our model training operations. Our team manages web crawling and GPTBot services and works closely with Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling teams. We are looking for a skilled Software Engineer to join our Data Acquisition team. Responsibilities: Own and lead engineering projects in the area of data acquisition including web crawling, data ingestion, and search. Collaborate with other sub-teams, such as Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling, to ensure smooth data flow and system operability. Work closely with the legal team to handle any compliance or data privacy-related matters. Develop and deploy highly scalable distributed systems capable of handling petabytes of data. Architect and implement algorithms for data indexing and search capabilities. Build and maintain backend services for data storage, including work with key-value databases and synchronization. Deploy solutions in a Kubernetes Infrastructure-as-Code environment and perform routine system checks. Conduct and analyze experiments on data to provide insights into system performance. Qualifications: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field. 4+ years of industry experience in software development. Experience with large web crawlers a plus Strong expertise in large stateful distributed systems and data processing. Proficiency in Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code concepts. Willingness and enthusiasm for trying new approaches and technologies. Ability to handle multiple tasks and adapt to changing priorities. Strong communication skills, both written and verbal. 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

By applying to this role, you will be considered for Research Engineer roles across all teams at OpenAI. About the Role As a Research Engineer here, you will be responsible for building AI systems that can perform previously impossible tasks or achieve unprecedented levels of performance. We're looking for people with solid engineering skills (for example designing, implementing, and improving a massive-scale distributed machine learning system), writing bug-free machine learning code, and building the science behind the algorithms employed. The most outstanding deep learning results are increasingly attained at a massive scale, and these results require engineers who are comfortable working in large distributed systems. We expect engineering to play a key role in most major advances in AI of the future. We expect you to: Have strong programming skills Have experience working in large distributed systems Be excited about OpenAI’s approach to research Nice to have: Interested in and thoughtful about the impacts of AI technology Past experience in creating high-performance implementations of deep learning algorithms 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, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment

This role will support the fleet infrastructure team at OpenAI. The fleet team focuses on running the world’s largest, most reliable, and frictionless GPU fleet to support OpenAI’s general purpose model training and deployment. Work on this team ranges from Maximizing GPUs doing useful work by building user-friendly scheduling and quota systems Running a reliable and low maintenance platform by building push-button automation for kubernetes cluster provisioning and upgrades Supporting research workflows with service frameworks and deployment systems Ensuring fast model startup times though high performance snapshot delivery across blob storage down to hardware caching Much more! About the Role As an engineer within Fleet infrastructure, you will design, write, deploy, and operate infrastructure systems for model deployment and training on one of the world’s largest GPU fleet. The scale is immense, the timelines are tight, and the organization is moving fast; this is an opportunity to shape a critical system in support of OpenAI's mission to advance AI capabilities responsibly. 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, implement and operate components of our compute fleet including job scheduling, cluster management, snapshot delivery, and CI/CD systems. Interface with researchers and product teams to understand workload requirements Collaborate with hardware, infrastructure, and business teams to provide a high utilization and high reliability service You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience with hyperscale compute systems Possess strong programming skills Have experience working in public clouds (especially Azure) Have experience working in Kubernetes Execution focused mentality paired with a rigorous focus on user requirements As a bonus, have an understanding of AI/ML workloads About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI resea

About the Team The Monetization team is a new cross-functional group working across engineering, product, research, and design to build the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. Our mission is to develop user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products—including next-generation ads experiences—that strengthen user trust, unlock economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation. Monetization plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to continue pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities while ensuring the benefits of AGI are broadly shared. We believe monetization must be aligned with user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem of developers and businesses. This team operates in a greenfield environment and moves quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to bring research breakthroughs into real-world systems at global scale. About the Role We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help build the core infrastructure behind OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems. In this foundational role, you’ll architect and implement distributed systems that power OpenAI’s monetization stack—focusing on reliability, performance, privacy, and large-scale operation. You’ll work across backend, systems, and platform layers to define and implement 0→1 infrastructure, partnering closely with Product, Design, and Research to shape the future of monetized AI experiences. Your work will enable both internal and external teams to build on safe, scalable, and robust monetization primitives. This role is exclusively based across our San Francisco & Seattles sites. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Design and build the foundational backend and infrastructure powering OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems Architect large-scale distributed systems that

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 As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten, you will partner directly with customers to architect, build, and deploy high-scale production AI applications on Baseten’s platform. You’ll own the journey with customers from initial exploration to production deployment, translating ambiguous business goals into reliable, observable services with clear quality, latency, and cost outcomes. This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want a front-row view into how modern companies adopt AI at scale and who enjoy working across product, software development, performance engineering, and customer-facing implementations. To be clear, this is an engineering role with hands-on coding and software development that also includes aspects of product management, technical customer success, and pre-sales solution engineering mixed in. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team: Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs RESPONSIBILITIES Develop and maintain software systems and product features using one or more general-purpose programming languages in a production-level environment, with a preference for Python due to its relevance in ML projects. Drive customer impact by designing, implementin

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 As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten, you will partner directly with customers to architect, build, and deploy high-scale production AI applications on Baseten’s platform. You’ll own the journey with customers from initial exploration to production deployment, translating ambiguous business goals into reliable, observable services with clear quality, latency, and cost outcomes. This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want a front-row view into how modern companies adopt AI at scale and who enjoy working across product, software development, performance engineering, and customer-facing implementations. To be clear, this is an engineering role with hands-on coding and software development that also includes aspects of product management, technical customer success, and pre-sales solution engineering mixed in. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team: Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs RESPONSIBILITIES Develop and maintain software systems and product features using one or more general-purpose programming languages in a production-level environment, with a preference for Python due to its relevance in ML projects. Drive customer impact by designing, implementin