Performance Modeling Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team Our Inference team brings OpenAI’s most capable research and technology to the world through our products. We empower consumers, enterprise and developers alike to use and access our start-of-the-art AI models, allowing them to do things that they’ve never been able to before. We focus on performant and efficient model inference, as well as accelerating research progression via model inference. About the Role We are looking for an engineer who wants to take the world's largest and most capable AI models and optimize them for use in a high-volume, low-latency, and high-availability production and research environment. In this role, you will: Work alongside machine learning researchers, engineers, and product managers to bring our latest technologies into production. Work alongside researchers to enable advanced research through awesome engineering. Introduce new techniques, tools, and architecture that improve the performance, latency, throughput, and efficiency of our model inference stack. Build tools to give us visibility into our bottlenecks and sources of instability and then design and implement solutions to address the highest priority issues. Optimize our code and fleet of Azure VMs to utilize every FLOP and every GB of GPU RAM of our hardware. You might thrive in this role if you: Have an understanding of modern ML architectures and an intuition for how to optimize their performance, particularly for inference. Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. Have at least 5 years of professional software engineering experience. Have or can quickly gain familiarity with PyTorch, NVidia GPUs and the software stacks that optimize them (e.g. NCCL, CUDA), as well as HPC technologies such as InfiniBand, MPI, NVLink, etc. Have experience architecting, building, observing, and debugging production distributed systems. Bonus point if worked on performance-critical distributed systems. Have need

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 machine learning infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems. In this foundational role, you’ll design and develop the platform layer that enables teams to build, train, deploy, serve, monitor, and continuously improve machine learning models used across advertising and monetization products. You’ll work across the full ML lifecycle, from large-scale data pipelines and feature infrastructure to training systems, model serving, experimentation platforms, and monitoring frameworks. The systems you build will support high-throughput, low-latency advertising workloads while maintaining strict standards for reliability, privacy, security, and performance. This role sits at the intersection of machine learning systems, distributed infrastructure, and monetization, offering the opportunity to shape the core platforms that help translate model innovation into m

About the Team OpenAI's Training team is responsible for producing the large language models that power our research, our products, and ultimately bring us closer to AGI. Achieving this goal requires combining deep research into improving our current architecture, datasets and optimization techniques, alongside long-term bets aimed at improving the efficiency and capability of future generations of models. We are responsible for integrating these techniques and producing model artifacts used by the rest of the company, and ensuring that these models are world-class in every respect. Recent examples of artifacts with major contributions from our team include GPT4-Turbo, GPT-4o and o1-mini. About the Role As a member of the architecture team, you will push the frontier of architecture development for OpenAI's flagship models, enhancing intelligence, efficiency, and adding new capabilities. Ideal candidates have a deep understanding of LLM architectures, a sophisticated understanding of model inference, and a hands-on empirical approach. A good fit for this role will be equally happy coming up with a creative breakthrough, investing in strengthening a baseline, designing an eval, debugging a thorny regression, or tracking down a bottleneck. This role is based in San Francisco. 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, prototype and scale up new architectures to improve model intelligence Execute and analyze experiments autonomously and collaboratively Study, debug, and optimize both model performance and computational performance Contribute to training and inference infrastructure You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience landing contributions to major LLM training runs Can thoroughly evaluate and improve deep learning architectures in a self-directed fashion Are motivated by safely deploying LLMs in the real world Are well-versed in the state of the art tran

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 Actuator Design and Integration Engineer to lead the development of custom electromechanical actuators for advanced robotic systems. You will own actuator development from early architecture and concept generation through prototype validation and system integration, partnering closely with mechanical, electrical, controls, firmware, reliability, and manufacturing teams. This role focuses on the design, integration, and validation of precision electromechanical systems, including motors, transmissions, sensing, structural components, and thermal architectures. You will help drive actuator development across the full engineering lifecycle while establishing scalable design, test, and integration practices for future robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Lead the architecture, design, and integration of custom robotic actuators, including motors, transmissions, sensing, thermal systems, structural components, and packaging. Define actuator requirements and system-level trade studies around torque density, bandwidth, efficiency, thermal performance, backdrivability, inertia, reliability, manufacturability, and cost. Design precision electromechanical assemblies with strong attention to tolerances, alignment, load paths, thermal expansion, sealing, wear, and serviceability. Drive actuator integration into robotic systems, partnering closely with controls, firmware, electrical, and robotics software teams to optimize closed-loop pe

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 Data Understanding team is responsible for creating the high quality datasets and their quantized representation for OpenAI. This includes synthesizing data, building VQ representations, and processing, filtering, deduplication, quality control, and tokenization so it can be used effectively in big model training runs. About The Role We're looking to advance how OpenAI builds and understands pretraining data at scale. You'll treat data quality and curation as core research problems: developing new methods to select, combine, and transform data; creating datasets that improve model capabilities; and designing rigorous experiments to understand how data choices and interventions affect model learning and downstream behavior. You'll work closely with frontier models and web-scale data to build evidence for which approaches work and why, then translate successful research into scalable data processing pipelines We Expect You To Have a strong track record of new or improved ML ideas, through publications, projects, or applied research. Own and drive a research agenda, from choosing the right problems to carrying long-running work through to impact. Be excited by OpenAI’s empirical, collaborative approach to research. Nice To Have Thoughtfulness about AI’s impact, including privacy, provenance, and data quality. Experience building high-performance deep learning or large-scale data processing systems. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an 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

About the Team OpenAI's Research Data Team exists to accelerate the evaluation, safety and capabilities of our models and products. Made up of technical operators and software engineers, we design the methods in which we acquire and create data. About the Role As a Research Program Manager (RPM), Data Acquisition, you will partner with research, engineering, and operations to design and implement pragmatic solutions for acquiring data. You will be a key interface between our research roadmap and external data offerings. This role is based in our San Francisco HQ and will be part of a team of RPMs pushing the frontier of data acquisition. In this role, you will: Partner deeply with research: Work with researchers to scope data needs, define success criteria, and translate priorities into clear execution plans. Shape the data acquisition pipeline: Identify, evaluate, and advance high impact data opportunities - balancing research value, feasibility, quality, and responsible execution. Unblock yourself: Move work forward even when the path is unclear — using technical judgement, creative problem solving, and scrappy execution to make progress while longer-term solutions are still forming. Build lightweight systems and visibility: Use SQL, Python, dashboards, and simple tooling to track performance, quality, and blockers. Drive technical roadmaps: Collaborate with engineers to enhance data platforms, resolve blockers, and ensure security best practices such as access management. Scale your impact: Equip vendors and internal teams with the context, standards, and operating rhythms needed to focus on the most important problems. You’ll thrive in this role if you: Are proficient in SQL and Python for analysing datasets, querying databases, building dashboards, and generating actionable insights. Are comfortable using APIs, automation, and AI tools such as Codex to accelerate workflows, remove manual overhead, and upskill quickly in unfamiliar technical areas.Experience sou

About the Team The Integrity team at OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that our cutting-edge technology is not only revolutionary, but also secure from a myriad of adversarial threats. We strive to maintain the integrity of our platforms as they scale. The Integrity team is at the front lines of defending against misuse in all its forms: content abuse, scaled attacks, and other actions that could undermine the user experience or harm our operational stability. About the Role As a Machine Learning Engineer in OpenAI's Integrity team, you will have the opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds in AI. You’ll work on state-of-the-art models and classifiers, experiment with new architecture and approaches, and push forward our abilities in content and user understanding. You’ll help turn research breakthroughs into tangible solutions that improve the trust and safety of our platform. If you're excited about training LLMs and building ML models, this role is your chance to make a significant mark. In this role, you will: Innovate and Deploy: Design and deploy advanced machine learning models that solve real-world problems. Bring OpenAI's research from concept to implementation, creating AI-driven applications with a direct impact. Collaborate with the Best: Work closely with researchers, software engineers, and product managers to understand complex business challenges and deliver AI-powered solutions. Be part of a dynamic team where ideas flow freely and creativity thrives. Optimize and Scale: Implement scalable data pipelines, optimize models for performance and accuracy, and ensure they are production-ready. Contribute to projects that require cutting-edge technology and innovative approaches. Learn and Lead: Stay ahead of the curve by engaging with the latest developments in machine learning and AI. Take part in code reviews, share knowledge, and lead by example to maintain high-quality engineering practices. Make a Difference: Monitor and maintain deployed m

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

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. The Infrastructure team is central to this mission, setting the core strategy and implementing the vision. From site selection to deployment to operations, this team sits at the intersection of commercial, technical, and operational domains, interacting with experts and executives inside and outside of OpenAI. We design and operate mission-critical facilities that support cutting-edge AI workloads at scale. About the Role We are seeking a Facilities Operations Lead to support the commissioning, deployment, and long-term operation of our next-generation AI data centers. This role bridges the interface between data center construction and hardware landing, ensuring seamless integration of mission-critical infrastructure with hardware deployment timelines. You will define and execute commissioning plans, support infrastructure bring-up, and take ownership of operations and maintenance for cutting-edge, large-scale, AI data centers. You will collaborate closely with design, construction, and hardware teams to define repeatable processes for new data center builds and lead hands-on operations to uphold the performance and reliability of our deployed infrastructure. Key Responsibilities Define and execute sequences of operations, commissioning steps, and bring-up processes for mission-critical data center facilities. Interface with the design and hardware teams to define deployment procedures tailored to each data center and hardware configuration. Oversee installation, commissioning, and operational readiness of large-scale data center campuses. Manage monitoring, maintenance, and quality control of the data center infrastructure, including high-performance liquid cooling systems. Develop on-site operations staffing strategy. Develop and enforce procedures for planed and unplanned downtime and SLAs for critical

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 The Core Services team is responsible for building and managing foundational services. It acts as the bridge between core infrastructure (e.g. compute, storage, networking) and product engineering teams, and enables product teams to move fast, build reliably, and scale efficiently. About the Role As a software engineer in the core services team, you will design and operate critical backend platforms such as caching systems, workflow orchestration, metadata stores, and file services. You’ll focus on building highly reliable, scalable, and performant systems that serve as the backbone of our products. We’re looking for people who are passionate about building infrastructure that empowers product teams, love working on distributed systems challenges, and enjoy creating well-designed APIs and abstractions that accelerate development. 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, build, and maintain shared infrastructure services such as caching layers, workflow orchestration (Temporal), metadata stores, and file storage services. Collaborate with product teams to provide scalable, reliable primitives that abstract the complexities of distributed systems. Improve performance, resilience, and scalability of core services that power customer-facing applications. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience with distributed systems, caching infrastructure (e.g., Redis, Memcached), metadata storage (e.g., FoundationDB), or workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal, Cadence). Have experience running containerized services in cloud environments and integrating them into automated build/test/release (CI/CD) workflows. Understand trade-offs in consistency models, replication strategies, and performance optimization in multi-region systems. Excel at communication and collaboration with cross-functional teams, and are obsesse

About the Team At OpenAI, we’re building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence. We deploy our models through ChatGPT, our APIs, and other cutting-edge products. Behind the scenes, making these systems fast, reliable, and cost-efficient requires world-class infrastructure. The Caching Infrastructure team is responsible for building a caching layer that powers many critical use cases at OpenAI. We aim to provide a high-availability, multi-tenant cache platform that scales automatically with workload, minimizes tail latency, and supports a diverse range of use cases. We’re looking for an experienced engineer to help design and scale this critical infrastructure. The ideal candidate has deep experience in distributed caching systems (e.g., Redis, Memcached), networking fundamentals, and Kubernetes-based service orchestration. In This Role, You Will: Design, build, and operate OpenAI’s multi-tenant caching platform used across inference, identity, quota, and product experiences. Define the long-term vision and roadmap for caching as a core infra capability, balancing performance, durability, and cost. Collaborate with other infra teams (e.g., networking, observability, databases) and product teams to ensure our caching platform meets their needs. You Might Thrive In This Role If You: Have 5+ years of experience building and scaling distributed systems, with a strong focus on caching, load balancing, or storage systems. Have deep expertise with Redis, Memcached, or similar solutions, including clustering, durability configurations, client-side connection patterns, and performance tuning. Have production experience with Kubernetes, service meshes (e.g., Envoy), and autoscaling systems. Think rigorously about latency, reliability, throughput, and cost in designing platform capabilities. Thrive in a fast-paced environment and enjoy balancing pragmatic engineering with long-term technical excellence. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company d

About the Team OpenAI’s Inference team powers the deployment of our most advanced models - including our GPT models, 4o Image Generation, and Whisper - across a variety of platforms. Our work ensures these models are available, performant, and scalable in production, and we partner closely with Research to bring the next generation of models into the world. We're a small, fast-moving team of engineers focused on delivering a world-class developer experience while pushing the boundaries of what AI can do. We’re expanding into multimodal inference, building the infrastructure needed to serve models that handle image, audio, and other non-text modalities. These workloads are inherently more heterogeneous and experimental, involving diverse model sizes and interactions, more complex input/output formats, and tighter coordination with product and research. About the Role We’re looking for a software engineer to help us serve OpenAI’s multimodal models at scale. You’ll be part of a small team responsible for building reliable, high-performance infrastructure for serving real-time audio, image, and other MM workloads in production. This work is inherently cross-functional: you’ll collaborate directly with researchers training these models and with product teams defining new modalities of interaction. You'll build and optimize the systems that let users generate speech, understand images, and interact with models in ways far beyond text. In this role, you will: Design and implement inference infrastructure for large-scale multimodal models. Optimize systems for high-throughput, low-latency delivery of image and audio inputs and outputs. Enable experimental research workflows to transition into reliable production services. Collaborate closely with researchers, infra teams, and product engineers to deploy state-of-the-art capabilities. Contribute to system-level improvements including GPU utilization, tensor parallelism, and hardware abstraction layers. You might thrive in t

About the Team The 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