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 systems-minded engineer to help advance our kernel development, performance engineering, and hardware-software co-design capabilities, with a particular focus on AI-assisted workflows and tooling. This person will work at the intersection of kernel optimization, developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure, helping us improve both how production kernels are built and optimized, and how future hardware-software systems are designed and evaluated. The role is ideal for someone who is excited by low-level performance work, but also sees AI and automation as powerful tools for accelerating engineering velocity. You will help define the future of kernel engineering in the era of AI-assisted development. In this role, you may: Build developer tooling and workflows that make kernel development and performance optimization faster, more scalable, and easier to debug, integrate, and deploy. Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure that makes AI-assisted optimization systems more interpretable, reliable, and effective. Optimize production kernels end to end by formulating optimization problems, running search loops, analyzing bottlenecks, debugging generated implementations, and landing improvements into production. Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems that accelerate kernel optimization, correctness validation, and hardware-software co-design. Improve AI-assisted optimization systems for sp
Jobs in United States
Power And Performance Validation Engineer in San Francisco
15 active opportunities · Updated September 2026
Showing
15 jobs
Explore current power and performance validation engineer jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role We’re looking for an experienced systems software engineer to help define and build the host software stack for our custom next-generation AI systems. You will work close to the hardware on performance-critical software, including Linux kernel drivers, high-throughput I/O paths, and system-scale networking and RDMA. This role spans architecture, implementation, platform bring-up, debugging, and performance optimization. You will work across hardware and software boundaries to make new systems usable end to end, from low-level device interfaces through userspace tooling and production validation. In this role you will: Design, implement, and debug host-side systems software for AI infrastructure, including Linux kernel drivers and supporting userspace components. Build and optimize software paths for high-throughput, low-latency communication, including RDMA and related networking functionality. Develop software around PCIe, DMA, NICs, accelerators, memory movement, and device interaction. Bring up new hardware platforms and diagnose complex issues across kernel, firmware, networking, and hardware boundaries. Build tooling for integration, testing, diagnostics, observability, qualification, and performance characterization. Collaborate with hardware, networking, and platform teams to define interfaces and integrate new capabilities. Work with external vendors where needed to integrate technologies and drive issues to resolution. Contribute across the systems sof
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 work on the systems software strategy and execution that brings new AI silicon from first power-on to a fully integrated system running production-representative models at expected functionality and performance. You will define how software exercises and validates compute, memory, interconnect, and I/O subsystems, then build the diagnostics, automation, and observability needed to find issues quickly. This role sits at the center of silicon, firmware, platform, systems, and workload teams. You will turn hardware specifications and performance targets into an end-to-end bringup plan, drive cross-functional debug, and establish the stress and regression infrastructure that makes each new platform reliable across operating environments. In this role, you will: Contribute to the end-to-end software bringup and validation strategy for new silicon and first-party systems. Define software-driven test coverage across compute, memory, interconnect, I/O, and their system-level interactions. Build diagnostics, test automation, telemetry, and regression infrastructure that accelerate first-silicon learning and issue isolation. Lead bringup from initial silicon arrival through board and system integration, docking, runtime enablement, and model execution. Design stress tests that characterize reliability, performance, and stability across workloads and operating conditions. Translate architecture specifications and performance models into measurable acceptance crit
About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system-level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team is responsible for building the next generation of AI-native silicon while working closely with software and research partners to co-design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering production-grade silicon for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team also creates custom design tools and methodologies that accelerate innovation and enable hardware optimized specifically for AI. About the Role We are looking for an experienced Mechanical Engineer with 7+ years of experience in design of IT hardware from chip/package to system levels. You’ll work alongside experts in thermal, mechanical, electrical, software, and systems engineering to support the design, analysis, and validation of mechanical and thermal systems that ensure the reliability, efficiency, and longevity of mission-critical hardware. This position requires strong analytical skills, hands-on testing experience, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, cross-disciplinary environment. 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 mechanical design for AI supercomputer product in the data center application Collaborate with the cross functional team to design and optimize thermal solutions for data center hardware, including chips, power modules, and system-level cooling architectures Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate thermal management strategies into hardware design, from concept to mass production Design and validate mechanical systems, including chassis, enclosures, cooling systems, and high-power connections, ensuring alignment with performance and reliability standards. Perform 3D modeling, FEA, tolerance analysis, and prototyping, ensuring manufacturability and a
About the team: OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the role: We are seeking an experienced Optical Network Engineer to lead Laser related work within our optical interconnect efforts for large-scale compute systems. The role also requires broad, hands-on optical validation experience across IM/DD-based interconnects, working from lab characterization through production readiness and scaled deployment. In this role you will: Drive laser-focused requirements and technical direction within the broader optical interconnect roadmap. Lead evaluation and validation of optical components and subsystems, including laser-based elements, in lab and production-representative environments. Support end-to-end optical testing for IM/DD interconnects (e.g., module/system bring-up, characterization, debug, and readiness for scale). Work with external partners to align on development milestones, performance targets, and quality expectations. Own technical issue triage and resolution across performance, reliability, and manufacturability topics. Collaborate across internal teams to support integration, rollout, and operational success at scale. You might thrive in this role if you have: Strong experience in laser-focused optical engineering (development, validation, manufacturing readiness, or field support). Broad hands-on background with IM/DD optical technologies and optical test/debug workflows. Experience working with external suppliers/manufacturing partners and production-oriented execution. Demonstrated ability to debug complex t
About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role We’re looking for a product manufacturing & quality engineer, who will be responsible for driving technical initiatives related to the manufacturing, quality and reliability of our AI supercomputer hardware systems to ensure product success from concept to launch and through mass production. You’ll have the opportunity to coordinate with functional SMEs and work with a wide range of stakeholders, from design engineering and operations teams, TPMs, external industry vendors and partners to ensure that all products are developed and delivered on time and to the highest quality standards. 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 integrated manufacturing and quality readiness for a product across L6, L10, and L11, with clear gates, milestones, deliverables, owners, and closure criteria. Lead readiness of process flows, tooling, fixtures, assembly operations, test interfaces, and production controls. Review and contribute to work instructions. Translate product requirements into qualification plans, process controls, test requirements and acceptance criteria with design engineering and Area SMEs Coordinate and drive execution of product and process qualification, reliability testing, and validation with the relevant SMEs. Maintain traceable evidence that assigned products and processes meet agreed performance, reliability,
About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role We are seeking an experienced SoC Architect to lead the definition and development of next-generation custom AI silicon for edge deployments. This role will be responsible for shaping the architecture of highly efficient, high-performance SoCs optimized for machine learning inference and on-device intelligence. You will work cross-functionally with internal engineering teams and external ecosystem partners to translate product requirements into scalable silicon solutions, driving execution from concept through delivery. In this role you will: Define the architecture and technical roadmap for custom SoCs targeted for edge applications. Drive system-level tradeoff analysis across compute, memory, interconnect, power, thermal, and cost constraints. Architect energy-efficient ML compute subsystems optimized for inference workloads and real-world deployment environments. Collaborate with internal hardware, software, systems, and product teams to align architecture with platform needs. Partner with external silicon vendors, IP providers, and manufacturing partners to execute development plans. Lead hardware/software co-design efforts to maximize performance per watt and end-to-end system efficiency. Guide implementation teams through microarchitecture, RTL development, validation, and bring-up phases. Operate effectively in agile development environments and help teams deliver against aggressive schedules and milestones. You might thrive in this role if: Proven exper
About the Team The Workload team is responsible for designing and running OpenAI’s LLM training and inference infrastructure that powers frontier models at massive scale. Our systems unify how researchers train and serve models, abstracting away the complexity of performance, parallelism, and execution across vast GPU/accelerator fleets. By providing this foundation, the Workload team ensures that researchers can focus on advancing model capabilities while we handle the scale, efficiency, and reliability required to bring those models to life. About the Role We are looking for an engineer to design and implement the dataset infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s next-generation training stack. You will be responsible for building standardized dataset interfaces, scaling pipelines across thousands of GPUs, and proactively testing performance bottlenecks. In this role, you will collaborate closely with the multimodal researchers, and other infra groups to ensure datasets are unified, efficient, and easy to consume. In this role, you will: Design and maintain standardized dataset APIs, including for multimodal (MM) data that cannot fit in memory. Build proactive testing and scale validation pipelines for dataset loading at GPU scale. Collaborate with teammates to integrate datasets seamlessly into training and inference pipelines, ensuring smooth adoption and a great user experience. Document and maintain dataset interfaces so they are discoverable, consistent, and easy for other teams to adopt. Establish safeguards and validation systems to ensure datasets remain reproducible and unchanged once standardized. Debug and resolve performance bottlenecks in distributed dataset loading (e.g., straggler systems slowing global training). Provide visualization and inspection tools to surface errors, bugs, or bottlenecks in datasets. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong engineering fundamentals with experience in distributed systems, data pipelines, or infrastructure.
About the Team OpenAI’s Infrastructure organization builds and evaluates the systems that power advanced AI workloads. We work closely with hardware, modeling, and architecture teams to ensure that new platforms deliver real-world performance aligned with workload needs. Our team focuses on understanding workload behavior across evolving hardware platforms—bridging the gap between theoretical capability and observed system performance. About the Role We are seeking a Workload Porting & Performance Engineer to evaluate new hardware platforms by porting benchmarks and real-world workloads, analyzing performance, and identifying system bottlenecks. In this role, you will bring up workloads on new systems, characterize performance behavior, and adapt workloads to better utilize hardware capabilities. You will play a critical role in validating new platforms and ensuring that performance aligns with expectations across compute, memory, and networking subsystems. This role requires strong hands-on experience with performance analysis, workload optimization, and system-level debugging across hardware and software boundaries. 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. Key Responsibilities Port and enable benchmarks and real-world workloads on new hardware platforms. Evaluate system performance across compute, memory, storage, and networking subsystems. Identify and analyze performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Adapt and optimize workloads to better utilize hardware capabilities. Develop and run performance experiments and profiling workflows. Compare expected vs. observed performance and provide feedback to: hardware architecture teams performance modeling teams system and software engineers. Debug issues across the stack, including software, runtime, and hardware interactions. Provide actionable insights to guide platform readiness and deployment decisions. Qualifications E
About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops system and infrastructure solutions optimized for advanced AI workloads. We collaborate across research, software, and external hardware partners to design and deploy next-generation AI systems at scale. Our team works closely with silicon vendors and system partners to evaluate emerging technologies, validate performance characteristics, and ensure that hardware capabilities translate effectively to real-world AI workloads. About the Role We are seeking a 3P Hardware Architecture Expert with deep expertise in GPU and accelerator architectures to engage directly with silicon vendors and guide hardware decisions for AI infrastructure. In this role, you will evaluate architectural tradeoffs across compute, memory, and interconnect systems, translating vendor specifications into real-world workload impact. You will play a critical role in early silicon evaluation, benchmarking, and performance validation, helping ensure that next-generation hardware meets the needs of our workloads. This role is highly hands-on and requires both deep technical understanding and the ability to engage at a high level with partners such as NVIDIA and AMD on architectural direction and design tradeoffs. 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. Key Responsibilities Engage deeply with silicon vendors (e.g NVIDIA & AMD) on GPU and accelerator architecture tradeoffs. Analyze and interpret performance, power, and efficiency characteristics of next-generation hardware. Translate vendor specifications into expected real-world performance for AI workloads. Evaluate architectural aspects including: compute throughput and utilization memory systems (HBM, cache hierarchies, bandwidth constraints) data types and precision tradeoffs (FP16, BF16, FP8, etc.) interconnect and scaling behavior. Run benchmarks and profiling to validate hardware performance a
About the Team OpenAI develops models that can reason through complex problems and hardware designed for the demands of advanced AI. AI for Chips connects these efforts: applying increasingly capable AI systems to the work of semiconductor engineering. Our goal is to help engineers develop better chips and shorten design cycles. This work brings research, model training, and hardware expertise together to build tools that engineers can use on real designs, with correctness and measurable performance at the center. About the Role We’re hiring a Software Engineer to build the research infrastructure and tooling that help OpenAI models design silicon. You’ll turn chip-design workflows into reliable environments for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and make it easier for researchers to run experiments and iterate on new ideas. You’ll move between software engineering, tool integration, and open research problems. We value strong coding fundamentals, clear technical judgment, and independent execution. Prior chip-design experience is helpful, but you can learn the domain alongside the team’s hardware specialists. In this role, you will: Build and maintain infrastructure for reinforcement learning environments, evaluations, and long-running experiments. Integrate electronic design automation (EDA) tools into workflows for RTL generation, verification, and physical design optimization. Improve experiment reliability, reproducibility, observability, and performance; debug failures across tools, services, and infrastructure. Develop tooling and model harnesses that let researchers test ideas quickly and measure correctness and power, performance, and area (PPA). Collaborate with researchers and engineers to turn successful experiments into reusable systems and training workflows. Own ambiguous projects end to end, communicate progress, and use results to guide the next iteration. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong software engineering fundamentals, with
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, Seattle, Washington D.C., Raleigh, London, and Amsterdam. About the Team At Embedded Insights, we find the best machine learning opportunities for external products and internal systems, and collaborate with cross-functional partners to bring them to life. We are a central team of Machine Learning Engineers and Data Scientists. We embed with partner teams to build and apply machine learning models that improve internal decision-making and power the Plaid product suite. About the Role You will be the first Data Scientist on the Embedded Insights team, part of Plaid’s Data organization. You will establish the analytics and metrics backbone for a team supporting a diverse set of internal and external products. You will help drive better decision-making, support machine learning model development, and contribute directly to the health of the Plaid network and the quality of Plaid’s products. Your day-to-day work will include: Analyzing entities across the Plaid network to understand behavior and identify opportunities, anomalies, and risks. Creating foundational metrics, dashboards, and monitoring systems that provide a clear view of network health and machine learning model performance. Evaluating the value and performance of machine learni
About the Team The Personal AGI team seeks to empower all of humanity to benefit from frontier intelligence in whatever way they choose. We are responsible for training models to deploy to millions of users globally via ChatGPT, the API, and future products. We aim to evolve ChatGPT from a chatbot to an infinitely capable and personalized superassistant supporting human flourishing. We work on defining, measuring, and improving capabilities across the training stack. Our focus areas include but are not limited to model behavior, personalization, safety, factuality, instruction following, personality, interactivity, multilingual fluency, world interaction, and bringing agents to everyone. We chart the course for what to strive towards. We partner closely with research and product teams across the company ensuring that our models are safe, efficient, and reliable. About the Role You’ll work as a Research Engineer / Scientist on the North Stars team within the broader Personal AGI research org. You will work on bringing the next generation of AI-enabled experiences to all of humanity by closing the capability overhang between power users and the average consumer, including areas like tool-use, feature discovery, connectors, and instruction following. You will think deeply about the current bottlenecks in model behavior, translate these insights into robust evals, training data, reward signals, and model and harness improvements. We're looking for individuals with strong ML engineering skills and research experience passionate about creative, product-driven research. 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 and pursue a research agenda to improve model capability and performance. Collaborate closely with the other research and product teams, allowing customers to optimize their own models. Build robust evaluations for tracking modelin
About the Team OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products—and shape how people experience AI in the future. Our team works across silicon, embedded systems, operating systems, and cloud services to build reliable consumer devices and the novel platforms required to support them. We partner closely with research to bring advanced AI capabilities into the physical world. About the Role As an Operating Systems Engineer focused on on-device inference, you will design, develop, and ship the OS stack that makes advanced AI capabilities reliable, responsive, and energy efficient on consumer devices. Your work will span OS services and frameworks, inference runtime integration, model fitting, scheduling, and performance and power management. You’ll partner with research to adapt models to device constraints, make design decisions across the stack, and carry solutions from early exploration through integration and production. In this role, you will: Build the inference platform: Design and implement maintainable OS services, frameworks, and clear interfaces for inference execution, model loading and lifecycle, and resource management. Fit models to device constraints: Partner with researchers on quantization, runtime integration, and memory optimization to meet memory, compute, and energy budgets while evaluating model quality and product behavior. Coordinate system resources: Develop scheduling and resource policies that balance inference with other device act
About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role We are seeking a highly skilled Physical Design Engineer with deep expertise in physical design and methodology. This individual contributor role sits within our physical design team and is central to delivering power, performance, and area (PPA) optimized datapath and interconnect solutions for next-generation AI accelerators. You’ll work closely with RTL designers to define and execute on physical design strategies. You will develop tools, flows and methodologies to increase team productivity. Your work will directly impact silicon’s performance and cost efficiency, as well as the team’s execution velocity and quality. In this role, you will: Develop, build and own tools, flows and methodologies for physical implementation Own physical implementation of floorplan blocks from floorplanning to final signoff Collaborate with RTL designers to drive optimal block implementation solutions Analyze and optimize design for timing, power, and area trade-offs, working in collaboration with EDA vendors and ASIC partners Qualifications: BS w/ 4+ or MS with 2+ years or PhD with 0-1 year(s) of relevant industry experience in physical design and methodology development Demonstrated success in taping out complex silicon designs Hands-on experience with block physical implementation and PPA convergence Strong coding experience with python, bazel, TCL Strong experience building physical design tools, flows and methodologies Strong understanding of microarchitecture, RTL design,
Other cities to consider
More places hiring for this role
Get new power and performance validation engineer jobs in San Francisco, United States by email
Daily job updates · Unsubscribe anytime