System Ip Design Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team We bring OpenAI's technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. About the Role OpenAI is looking for an experienced Performance Engineer to help us scale the performance, reliability, and efficiency of our systems. In this role, you'll apply deep technical expertise to optimize infrastructure and application-level performance across mission-critical products like ChatGPT and our developer API. You’ll work cross-functionally with teams building core services, training models, and developing real-time user experiences to push our latency, throughput, and cost-efficiency to the next level. We are looking for engineers who thrive in ambiguous environments, value deep systems understanding, and are motivated by delivering measurable impact. This is a highly technical, individual contributor role focused on root-cause analysis, profiling, instrumentation, and architecture-level performance improvements across our stack. In this role, you will: Analyze and optimize performance across application, middleware, runtime, and infrastructure layers—networking, storage, Python runtime, GPU utilization, and beyond. Develop tooling and metrics that provide deep observability into system performance. Collaborate closely with infra, platform, training, and product teams to identify key performance goals and drive systemic improvements. Influence architecture and design decisions to prioritize latency, throughput, and efficiency at scale. Lead investigations into high-impact performance regressions or scalability issues in production. Drive performance testing strategies and help define SLAs/SLOs around latency and throughput for critical systems. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong tr

About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and advancing toward AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments. Working across the full model and systems 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 physical constraints of real-world systems to improve people’s lives. About the Role We're looking for an experienced Electrical Engineer to help develop the next generation of robotic systems at OpenAI. This role spans the full lifecycle of hardware development, from early concept exploration and prototyping through circuit design, component selection, PCB layout, bring-up, integration, and deployment. Engineers in this role are expected to independently drive significant hardware efforts from initial concept through deployment. You will translate ambiguous goals into concrete engineering plans, make key technical decisions, coordinate closely with cross-functional partners, and own execution through the iterations required to deliver a successful system. Many of the systems we build are still being defined. You will work closely with mechanical, firmware, software, controls, and research teams to evaluate new ideas, develop novel hardware, and integrate it into robotic platforms. Success in this role requires strong engineering judgment, comfort operating in ambiguous spaces, and the ability to balance rapid experimentation with the discipline required to build reliable and scalable systems. The ideal candidate enjoys building things from first principles and is equally comfortable evaluating a new technology, debugging a prototype on the bench, reviewing PCB layout details, and driving system integration efforts. You should be able to move quickly when appropriate, but also know when investing in robustness, simplicity, or infrastructure will create leverage for future development. This role is

About OpenAI OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our mission requires building not only world-class AI models, but also the infrastructure that enables those models to be deployed reliably, efficiently, and at global scale. As demand for AI continues to grow, we are expanding the ways OpenAI can bring high-performance inference capacity online across a diverse hardware ecosystem. About the Team The GPT Infrastructure team builds software that turns advanced inference and optimization research into production products. One focus is enabling strategic infrastructure partners and accelerator vendors to qualify and onboard new compute without a bespoke porting and optimization effort for every hardware platform. We build the control planes, APIs, secure partner-side execution environments, evaluation systems, artifact pipelines, and operational tooling that make these workflows repeatable and trustworthy. The work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, AI inference, compilers and runtimes, performance engineering, security, and external partnerships. About the Role We are seeking an experienced systems generalist who can work comfortably across the stack to help build an automated inference optimization platform. Given a workload, target hardware profile, compiler and runtime context, and a trusted verifier, the system runs durable optimization campaigns that generate, compile, execute, grade, and improve candidate kernels, runtime configurations, and serving-stack changes. You will design both the OpenAI-hosted control plane and the partner-side software that evaluates candidates on real accelerator hardware. The product must keep long-running workflows reliable, make performance results reproducible, and maintain clear trust boundaries around sensitive model and hardware information. This is a deeply cross-stack role, combining strong software engineering fundamentals with systems thinking and

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 Systems Integration team is responsible for building the infrastructure, tooling, and validation systems that ensure our device software is reliable, testable, and ready to ship. We design and maintain automated test frameworks, hardware-in-the-loop labs, and release pipelines that keep quality signals trustworthy and enable rapid, safe product launches. Our work spans developer tools, automation, systems integration, and cross-team collaboration to ensure every release meets the highest standards. About the Role As a Software Engineer, Quality and Developer Tools , you will build and own the systems that validate our device software—from test frameworks and regression infrastructure to hardware-in-the-loop labs and release gates. You’ll design the tooling and automation that keep quality signals trustworthy, integrate them into CI/CD, and make it easy for engineers and QA vendor technicians to execute reliable, repeatable workflows. We’re looking for engineers with deep experience in software quality, automation, developer tooling, and hardware-software integration who thrive on building scalable, reliable systems for validation and release readiness. 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: Test infrastructure & frameworks: Design, implement, and maintain a unified test framework for device software across unit, integration, system, and end-to-end testing, with reproducible runs and integrations with GitHub, Linear, and Slack. CI/CD integration & releases: Integrate test suites with Buildkite, enforce promotion criteria for staging and production, auto-file regressions, and publish traceable artifacts and release notes. Hardware-in-the-loop lab design & orchestration: Plan and bring up racks, power and networking systems, and orchestration for device testing; support automated flashing, provisioning

About the Team The Safety Systems team is dedicated to ensuring the safety, robustness, and reliability of AI models and their deployment in the real world. Learn more about OpenAI’s approach to safety. Building on the many years of our practical alignment work and applied safety efforts, Safety Systems addresses emerging safety issues and develops new fundamental solutions to enable the safe deployment of our most advanced models and future AGI, to make AI that is beneficial and trustworthy. About the Role At OpenAI, we're dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence, and we know that creating a secure and reliable platform is vital to our mission. That's why we're seeking a software engineer to help us build out our trust and safety capabilities. In this role, you'll work with our entire engineering team to design and implement systems that detect and prevent abuse, promote user safety, and reduce risk across our platform. You'll be at the forefront of our efforts to ensure that the immense potential of AI is harnessed in a responsible and sustainable manner. Your Responsibilities: Architect, build, and maintain anti-abuse and content moderation infrastructure designed to protect us and end users from unwanted behavior. Work closely with our other engineers and researchers to utilize both industry standard and novel AI techniques to measure, monitor and improve AI models’ alignment to human values. . Diagnose and remediate active incidents on the platform and build new tooling and infrastructure that address the root causes of system failure. You might thrive in this role if: You have built and run production services in a high growth, rapidly scaling environment. You can debug live issues and restore systems quickly. You have worked on content safety, fraud, or abuse, or are motivated and excited to work on present-day (“now-term”) AI safety. You have experience with Python or with modern languages such as C++, Rust, or Go, and are able to quickly ramp up on Py

About the Team Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security team protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products. We are technical in what we build but are operational in how we do our work, and are committed to supporting all products and research at OpenAI. Our Security team tenets include: prioritizing for impact, enabling researchers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and engaging a robust security culture. About the Role As a Security Engineer on Detection & Response, you’ll help protect OpenAI’s most sensitive assets– including our intellectual property, customer data, and the infrastructure that supports them– by building and operating the systems we use to detect suspicious activity and respond effectively when it matters. You’ll work across endpoints, identity, cloud, hyperscale compute infrastructure, and datacenter-adjacent layers, partnering closely with security teams and infrastructure owners to define the telemetry and response requirements we need and building tooling and automation where it delivers the most leverage. In this role, you will: Build and evolve Detection & Response capabilities across OpenAI’s infrastructure, products, and research environments, with an emphasis on high-signal detection and reliable operational response. Engineer detection pipelines and tooling: develop rule lifecycle management, measurement/quality loops (coverage, precision, latency), tuning processes, and safe rollout patterns. Automate response and investigations by building workflows that reduce toil (triage, enrichment, containment, evidence capture) and improve time-to-understand/time-to-contain. Partner with other Security teams and system/infrastructure owners across the company to ensure new systems ship with the right telemetry, threat models, and response playbooks from day one. Define D&R requirements and drive visibility across endpoin

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

About the Team The Software Engineering Firmware team builds reliable, high-performance systems on custom hardware. We work closely with hardware engineers to design, optimize, and ship software that bridges cutting-edge devices and real-world constraints like memory, power, and latency. Our work spans early prototyping through product launch, ensuring that our embedded platforms are robust, efficient, and production-ready. About the Role As a Firmware Engineer , you will design, implement, and debug software for embedded devices. You’ll own low-level bring-up, write production C/C++ code, and partner closely with hardware teams to deliver reliable, high-performance systems. We’re looking for engineers with deep embedded expertise, strong debugging skills, and a passion for building systems that perform under real-world conditions. 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: Design, implement, and debug software for embedded devices. Contribute to defining software requirements, interfaces, and test plans. Bring up and debug new boards. Analyze performance, memory, and power profiles and implement optimizations. Investigate field issues, perform root-cause analysis, and deliver robust fixes. Foster good software engineering practices. You might thrive in this role if you: Have deep experience shipping embedded systems (around 10+ years). Are proficient in C and C++. Are familiar with embedded toolchains, operating systems, and debugging tools. Have experience with both rapid prototyping and scalable product development. (Nice to have) Have experience with Zephyr RTOS. (Nice to have) Have worked with networking/wireless stacks (BLE, Wi-Fi). (Nice to have) Have experience with robotic system bring-up or Linux kernel development. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose arti

About the Team The Platform Systems team at OpenAI operates at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and large-scale distributed systems. We build the engineering and research infrastructure required to train OpenAI’s flagship models on some of the world’s largest, custom-built supercomputers. Our team develops core model training software and works deep in the stack - spanning collective communication, compute efficiency, parallelism strategies, fault tolerance, failure detection, and observability. The systems we build are foundational to OpenAI’s research velocity, enabling reliable, efficient training at frontier scale. We collaborate closely with researchers across the organization, continuously incorporating learnings from across OpenAI into the evolution of our training platform. About the Role As a Software Engineer, Platform Systems, you will design and build distributed systems that provide visibility into large-scale training workloads and help operate them reliably at scale. You’ll work on failure detection, tracing, and observability systems that identify slow or faulty nodes, surface performance bottlenecks, and help engineers understand and optimize massive distributed training jobs. This infrastructure is critical to operating OpenAI’s training stack and is actively evolving to support new use cases and increasingly complex workloads. This role sits at the core of our training infrastructure, blending systems engineering, performance analysis, and large-scale debugging. In This Role, You Will Design and build distributed failure detection, tracing, and profiling systems for large-scale AI training jobs Develop tooling to identify slow, faulty, or misbehaving nodes and provide actionable visibility into system behavior Improve observability, reliability, and performance across OpenAI’s training platform Debug and resolve issues in complex, high-throughput distributed systems Collaborate with systems, infrastructure, and research teams to evolve platform

About the Team The Release Engineer team is responsible for building and maintaining the systems that power software delivery—from CI/CD pipelines and artifact management to release automation and fleet telemetry. We ensure software across bootloaders, firmware, operating systems, and cloud services is built reproducibly, validated rigorously, and released safely at scale. About the Role As a Release Engineer, you’ll design, build, and operate release infrastructure that enables reliable, secure, and traceable software delivery across complex multi-component systems. You’ll partner closely with embedded, cloud, and QA teams to ensure that every build—from development to OTA deployment—is fast, verifiable, and production-ready. We’re looking for engineers who take pride in automation, build reproducibility, and system reliability—and who enjoy building the connective tissue that allows hardware and software to ship together seamlessly. 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: Design and operate CI/CD pipelines for multi-component builds (bootloader, firmware, OS images, backend, companion apps) using hermetic toolchains. Define versioning and branching strategies; automate promotions, changelogs, and artifact retention. Integrate unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test results; quarantine flaky tests, auto-bisect failures, and block unsafe promotions. Build A/B OTA update flows with verity and health checks; run staged rollouts and canaries; implement safe rollback and roll-forward strategies. Implement code signing for binaries and firmware, generate SBOMs, run vulnerability scanning, and attach build attestations and provenance. Manage dashboards and alerts for build health, promotion latency, failure rates, and fleet update telemetry. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience building and operating buil

About the Team OpenAI’s User Operations team shepherds our customers’ adoption of AI and ensures that our customers' product experience is nothing short of exceptional. We are building the very first post-AGI support team. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others, to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises. About the Role We’re looking for dedicated, experienced, and deeply curious individuals to help solve some of the most complex challenges faced by our customers while building the future of post-AGI support alongside us. In this role, you’ll work directly with customers through support tickets and live calls, troubleshooting high-impact issues and resolving novel, often ambiguous technical problems in one of the fastest-moving environments in technology. As AI adoption rapidly accelerates, the work you do will directly support mission-critical systems being built on OpenAI’s platform, serving as a critical line of defense for customers operating at massive scale. Beyond resolving technical issues, you’ll help define what world-class support looks like in an AGI-driven future. You’ll partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Operations to improve systems, reduce bugs, and elevate the customer experience, while leveraging automation, agents, and our own AI technology to transform how support operates at scale. You’ll be responsible for: Working directly with customers to troubleshoot and resolve their most complex technical issues, including API failures, integration challenges, authentication errors, and production incidents. Providing end-to-end ownership through debugging logs, analyzing system behavior, reproducing issues, and

About the Team Our Safety Systems team is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency. The Model Policy team aligns model behavior with desired human values and norms. We co-design policy with models and for models by driving rapid policy taxonomy iteration based on data and defining evaluation criteria for foundational models’ ability to reason about safety. Key focus areas include: catastrophic risk, mental health, teen safety and multimodal safety. About the Role Providing access to frontier AI systems raises complex questions around dual-use science and catastrophic risk. How should models respond to requests involving chemical synthesis, biological experimentation, or pathogen research? Where is the boundary between legitimate scientific inquiry and information that could enable misuse? How do we design policies that meaningfully reduce risk without unnecessarily restricting beneficial research? This is a senior role in which you’ll help shape policy creation and development at OpenAI for addressing biological and chemical risks. You will develop structured policy frameworks and taxonomies to guide safe model behavior. This role sits at the intersection of biosecurity expertise, AI safety research, and policy design. You will help ensure that frontier AI systems can support beneficial life sciences research, such as drug discovery, public health, and biosafety, while reducing the risk that these capabilities could be misused. Our relevant publications: Preparedness framework Preparing for future AI capabilities in biology Safety evaluations hub OpenAI GPT5 System Card Evaluating Fairness in ChatGPT Improving Model Safety Behavior with Rule-Based Rewards OpenAI Model Spec Your Responsibilities: Design and maintain model policies governing chemical and biological risk, defining how models should safely handle dual-use scenarios. Develop structured taxonomi

About the Team The Platform Analytics team builds the systems OpenAI researchers use to understand the quality and behavior of the models we train including what models are doing, why they behave in a particular way, and how that behavior changes across experiments. Neptune is a core part of this work. It ingests, stores, queries, and visualizes large volumes of metrics from pretraining, post-training, and reinforcement learning. Hundreds of researchers depend on these systems in their daily work to compare experiments, debug unexpected behavior, and decide what to try next. Our scope is broader than metrics. We also build platforms that help researchers analyze samples, traces, evaluation results, and other structured or unstructured data through dashboards, APIs, and increasingly agent-driven workflows. These systems need to remain fast, reliable, and understandable as the scale and complexity of research change quickly. We are not trying to become a consulting team that builds a separate solution for every research project. We work directly with researchers to understand recurring problems, then turn them into reusable infrastructure and platform capabilities that many teams can build on. About the Role We’re looking for a hands-on experienced software engineer who can take ownership of a critical system and drive it from problem definition through production adoption. This person should be able to own a platform such as CacheHouse end to end: define its technical direction, design its data model and storage architecture, integrate it with several research dashboards and workflows, guide one or two engineers, and ensure the system works reliably for its users. The right candidate should already bring the technical judgment, ownership, and execution expected at this level. The primary learning curve should be OpenAI’s stack and research problem space, not learning how to lead a complex engineering effort or deliver a production system. You will work directly with

About the Role We’re hiring a Product Designer to support People Innovation Labs, a fast-moving engineering team embedded in the People organization focused on rethinking how we find and retain the best talent and empower everyone to do their best work. From recruiting to culture, we’re designing systems and products that give our People Team a significant edge by infusing OpenAI’s models and first-principles thinking into every aspect of our work. Our projects range from greenfield 0-1 products like OpenHouse (our internal knowledge hub) to AI-powered automations and scalable recruiting tools. We’re defining the future of work at OpenAI, creating a blueprint for how AI can supercharge productivity, culture, and innovation. In this role, you’ll be embedded with Product and Engineering to ensure our work drives measurable business outcomes. In this role you will: Contribute to the overall design and product direction for internal People products at OpenAI Design and ship high-quality products and improvements, from early concepts to high-fidelity prototypes and visuals Partner closely with engineering, product management, AI research, and design peers to define both long-term strategy and short-term tactics Engage in user research to better understand our users and refine our products Contribute to and evolve our design system Help establish our design culture and grow our team You might thrive in this role if you: Have 4+ years of experience shipping larger scale software products Have a portfolio showcasing strong UX, UI, and interaction design skills, with a high bar for quality and craft Love thinking through complex interaction design problems Possess impactful communication and storytelling skills Enjoy tackling ambiguous problems and shaping them into a clear vision Get excited about being immersed in the AI research process and defining how AI-first products should look and behave About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensur