System Performance Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Consumer Devices team is building a new generation of AI-powered products that seamlessly integrate hardware and software to create intuitive, transformative experiences. We bring together experts across embedded systems, machine learning, hardware, design, and product engineering to develop products at the intersection of AI and consumer technology. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a System Performance Engineer to profile, benchmark, and optimize performance across our embedded hardware products. In this role, you will work across operating systems, applications, camera and vision, graphics, and platform teams to define product KPIs, build performance tooling, and drive optimizations from early lab characterization through product launch and real-world usage. You will help establish the performance standards that shape the user experience of our products, ensuring they remain responsive, efficient, and reliable throughout their lifecycle. This role requires deep expertise in embedded or high-performance systems, strong operating systems fundamentals, and hands-on experience debugging under tight latency, power, and memory constraints. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days per week in the office and one day working remotely. Relocation assistance is available for new hires. In this role, you will: Develop system performance benchmarks, methodologies, and policies to evaluate end-to-end product behavior. Profile and analyze performance across key product use cases and workloads using custom and industry-standard profiling tools. Partner closely with engineering teams to identify bottlenecks and drive performance optimizations across the software stack. Define high-level product KPIs and establish measurement frameworks to measure launch readiness and monitor performance throughout the product lifecycle. Measure, re

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 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 designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. We work closely with architecture, infrastructure, and vendor teams to evaluate system performance and guide critical design decisions. Our team focuses on building and applying performance modeling frameworks to understand system behavior, quantify tradeoffs, and support next-generation infrastructure design. About the Role We are seeking an Performance Modeling Engineer to support the development and application of modeling tools used to evaluate AI system performance and inform architectural decisions. In this role, you will partner closely with Senior Performance Modeling Engineers and the Performance Modeling Lead to analyze system behavior, run simulations and analytical models, and help evaluate tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, and storage. You will contribute to building modeling frameworks while developing a strong foundation in system architecture and AI infrastructure. This role is ideal for early-career engineers with 1–2 years of experience in software engineering, systems analysis, or performance modeling who are excited to grow in large-scale infrastructure and hardware/software systems. 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 Support the development and maintenance of performance modeling tools and frameworks Assist in building models to evaluate system behavior across compute, memory, networking, and interconnect subsystems Help analyze distributed system scaling behavior and identify performance bottlenecks Run simulations and analytical models to support architecture and infrastructure decisions Partner with senior engineers to evaluate design tradeoffs across hardware and system components Interpret modeling outputs and help translate findings into clear recommendations Vali

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops system and infrastructure solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. We work closely with architecture, infrastructure, and vendor teams to evaluate system performance and guide critical design decisions. Our team focuses on building and applying performance modeling frameworks to understand system behavior, quantify tradeoffs, and inform next-generation infrastructure design. About the Role We are seeking Performance Modeling Engineers to develop and apply modeling tools that evaluate AI system performance and inform architectural decisions. In this role, you will work closely with the Performance Modeling Lead and partner teams to analyze system behavior, run simulations or analytical models, and help quantify tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, and storage. You will contribute to building modeling frameworks and applying them to real-world questions that impact system design and vendor decisions. This role is well-suited for engineers with strong software or modeling backgrounds who are interested in developing deeper expertise in system architecture and AI infrastructure. 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 Develop and maintain performance modeling tools and frameworks. Build models to evaluate system behavior across: compute, memory, and interconnect subsystems distributed system scaling and bottlenecks. Run simulations and analytical models to support architectural tradeoff analysis. Collaborate with performance modeling lead and system architects to answer forward-looking design questions. Analyze and interpret modeling outputs, translating results into actionable insights. Validate models against real system measurements and workload behavior. Contribute to improving modeling fidelity, usability, and scalability. Qualifications Strong software engineeri

About the Team The Codex team is responsible for building state-of-the-art AI systems that can write code, reason about software, and act as intelligent agents for developers and non-developers alike. Our mission is to push the frontier of code generation and agentic reasoning, and deploy these capabilities in real-world products such as ChatGPT and the API, as well as in next-generation tools specifically designed for agentic coding. We operate across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure—owning the full lifecycle of experimentation, deployment, and iteration on novel coding capabilities. About the Role As a Performance & Systems Engineer on the Codex team, you will be responsible for whole-system optimization across a complex, evolving stack. Codex spans LLM inference, cloud orchestration, agentic work management, and multiple product surfaces. Your job will be to identify and land high-leverage changes—across infrastructure, modeling, and product layers—that make Codex agents significantly faster and cheaper to serve. We’re looking for generalists who thrive in ambiguity and love chasing performance bottlenecks to ground. This is a high-ownership role where your work will directly improve the experience of millions of users. 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: Hunt down and address inefficiencies across the Codex system stack, from agent behavior to LLM inference to container orchestration, and beyond. Build tooling to measure, profile, and optimize system performance at scale. Collaborate with researchers and engineers to land high-ROI changes that improve latency and cost. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience operating across both ML systems and cloud infrastructure. Enjoy diving into messy, ambiguous problems and emerging with clear wins. Think holistically about performance, balancing spee

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

What you’ll do Act as the technical lead for large parts of the scanner platform: system architecture, codebase structure, and long-term maintainability. Own core runtime foundations: distributed control, state management, fault handling, and reliability. Drive engineering rigor: testability, code quality, review standards, performance regression prevention, and release processes. Build robust observability: logs, metrics, traces, and replayable diagnostics (with privacy constraints). Collaborate with hardware and recon/ML teams to define interfaces, data contracts, timing/synchronization, and failure modes. Lead complex refactors (e.g., message passing / RPC boundaries, modularization, concurrency model) without halting forward progress. What we’re looking for Deep software architecture experience for real-world systems: robotics, instrumentation, medical devices, or other complex distributed products. Strong Python and concurrency background (asyncio, multiprocessing, profiling, performance engineering). Track record of shipping systems that are observable, debuggable, and resilient. Strong technical leadership: clarity, pragmatic trade-offs, and mentoring. Useful experience Building but rock-solid systems: clear interfaces (gRPC/protobuf or equivalent), strong state modeling, and failure handling. High-leverage engineering habits on a lean team: good tests, CI, reproducible dev environments, and fast code review. Practical performance + concurrency work in Python (asyncio, profiling, multiprocessing) and comfort debugging distributed behavior. Security-minded device software: safe defaults, encrypted data paths, and disciplined handling of PII/PHI. Operational thinking: remote updates/management, excellent logging, and diagnostics that make real hardware debuggable.

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 On the Accelerators team, you will help OpenAI evaluate and bring up new compute platforms that can support large-scale AI training and inference. Your work will range from prototyping system software on new accelerators to enabling performance optimizations across our AI workloads. You’ll work across the stack, collaborating with both hardware and software aspects - working on kernels, sharding strategies, scaling across distributed systems, and performance modeling. You'll help adapt OpenAI's software stack to non-traditional hardware and drive efficiency improvements in core AI workloads. This is not a compiler-focused role, rather bridging ML algorithms with system performance - especially at scale. In this role, you will: Prototype and enable OpenAI's AI software stack on new, exploratory accelerator platforms. Optimize large-scale model performance (LLMs, recommender systems, distributed AI workloads) for diverse hardware environments. Develop kernels, sharding mechanisms, and system scaling strategies tailored to emerging accelerators. Collaborate on optimizations at the model code level (e.g. PyTorch) and below to enhance performance on non-traditional hardware. Perform system-level performance modeling, debug bottlenecks, and drive end-to-end optimization. Work with hardware teams and vendors to evaluate alternatives to existing platforms and adapt the software stack to their architectures. Contribute to runtime improvements, compute/communication over

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: Voice is becoming the internet’s next interface, but a production-grade Voice AI system is "hard to build" . You’ll join a small founding team of Baseten Voice AI, focused on bringing state-of-the-art open source models into production for Voice AI customers across productivity, customer service, clinical conversation, creator tools, education, and more. You’ll make a meaningful impact on people’s daily lives and help reshape these industries. This is a high-impact, high-ownership role. You will be the primary owner of Baseten Voice AI - our in-house inference stack to power Voice AI models - from product roadmap through engineering implementation. You’ll partner closely with Forward Deployed Engineers, Model Performance Engineers, and sister engineering teams to push the boundaries of Voice AI. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES: Develop world-class model serving stack for state-of-the-art open-source voice models - reduce end-to-end and tail latency (p95/p99), increase throughput, and improve GPU efficiency via profiling, runtime tuning, and server-level optimizations. Build large-scale, real-time infrastructure for multi-model voice agents - orchestrate STT, TTS, and agent components with streaming I/O to meet customer SLOs. Design tight training and inference iteration loops for voice model customization - enable fast evaluation, safe rollout, and rapid experimentation for custom voice model development. Past projects:

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

About the Team The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models. Pushing the boundaries of data, scaling laws, optimization techniques, model architectures, and efficiency improvements to propel our science. The Search team sits within Foundations, building agentic search by co-designing model–system interfaces with the core search stack (serving, indexing, retrieval) to translate model intent into reliable, real-world actions. Operating at the frontier of AI and information retrieval, the team develops large-scale systems that transform and index vast corpora, enabling models to reason over global knowledge and act dependably. In close partnership with researchers, we rapidly bring modeling breakthroughs into production and redefine how intelligent systems discover, retrieve, and synthesize information at planetary scale. About the Role We’re looking for a Software Engineer focused on building and scaling retrieval systems. You’ll work with a team of researchers and engineers to develop infrastructure that enables models to retrieve and act on the right information at the right time. This includes designing and operating indexing systems, retrieval pipelines, and serving layers. This work supports retrieval across OpenAI products and research, with direct impact on system performance, reliability, and scale. Responsibilities Build and scale retrieval infrastructure across indexing, serving, and query execution. Develop low-latency, high-throughput systems for real-time model interaction. Partner with research to productionize embedding and retrieval techniques. Support dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval pipelines. Own system performance, reliability, and observability at scale. Collaborate across Pretraining, Inference, and Product teams to integrate retrieval end-to-e

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 an OS / K8s Systems Engineer at Baseten, you’ll build the automation and systems that turn raw GPU hardware into production-ready compute. From provisioning to orchestration, you’ll own the software layer that makes our infrastructure reproducible, scalable, and reliable across data centers. This is a senior, hands-on role focused on building systems not operating them. You’ll work close to the metal designing OS images, building provisioning pipelines, and automating cluster bring-up from scratch. Your work will define how quickly we can turn new capacity into usable compute. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Zero-to-cluster automation Build workflows that take new hardware from unprovisioned to fully operational cluster. Provisioning systems Design PXE-based or equivalent systems for imaging and lifecycle management. Reproducible infrastructure — Ensure clusters deploy consistently across data centers. RESPONSIBILITIES Own the end-to-end automation of cluster bring-up and lifecycle management. Build and maintain OS images, provisioning systems, and configuration pipelines. Deploy and operate cluster orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, Slurm, or similar). Design systems for reproducibility across sites and hardware generations. Automate upgrades, rollouts, and failure recovery. Optimize system performance, including GPU utilization and networking. Partner with hardware and network teams to validate and improve system b

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 The Online Data team builds and operates the core online database and indexing services for OpenAI’s production AI applications, including supporting the explosive growth of ChatGPT, the #1 AI app in the world, and Codex, the fastest growing agentic development toolset in the world. Our mission is to ensure the reliability, correctness, and scalability of our online data stack and to curate a comprehensive portfolio of services that matches the relentless ambition of OpenAI, enabling our product and research teams to build 0-100 without getting bogged down in the minutiae of multi-region, multi-cloud, exabyte-scale data infrastructure. About the Role We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our Online Data Systems team, responsible for our in-house database and indexing technology. This role is about shepherding a team of world-class engineers tasked with building and operating hyperscale data storage and retrieval technology. You’ll be overseeing the delivery of extremely challenging engineering work in areas like distributed query execution, multi-region federation, self-orchestrating and self-healing services, low-level performance optimization, and more. There are few companies in the world building this kind of technology in-house at this scale where you’ll still be getting in on the ground floor. Instead of being a cog in the machine spending months chasing small optimizations, you’ll play a major part of shaping our future. In this role, you will: Build, lead, and grow high-performing infrastructure engineering teams. Drive the evolution of OpenAI’s in-house online data technologies, our core, hyper-scale database systems, indexing technologies, and vector search. Anchor delivery around measurable reliability goals (SLOs, etc) to ensure system performance and resiliency is above reproach. Champion pragmatic use of agent technology to amplify execution velocity. Reduce operational toil and incident frequency through better abstractions, gua