System Performance Engineer in San Francisco

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 Full-Stack Engineer to join our Data Acquisition team to build and optimize the interfaces and tools that power our data infrastructure. Responsibilities: Develop and maintain full-stack applications that support data acquisition, including internal tools and dashboards. Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling, to ensure seamless data ingestion and workflow management. Design and implement APIs to facilitate data interactions between internal services and external data sources. Enhance user experience by developing intuitive web-based interfaces for managing and monitoring data pipelines. Optimize backend services for performance, scalability, and security in a distributed computing environment. Work with legal and compliance teams to ensure our data acquisition processes adhere to privacy regulations and best practices. Deploy and maintain infrastructure using Kubernetes and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) methodologies. Analyze system performance, conduct experiments, and improve data workflows to maximize efficiency. Qualifications: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field. 4+ years of industry experience in full-stack development. Proficiency in frontend frameworks (React, Vue, or similar) and backend technologies such as Python, Node.js, or Go. Strong expertise in RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and database design (SQL and NoSQL). Experience building data-intensive applications that handle large-scale datasets. Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker). Prior experience with web crawling and large-scale data processing is a

About 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 are looking for a Technical Program Manager to own actuator development and integration from system goals through production readiness. The actuator program spans mechanical, electrical, firmware, harnessing, controls, test, reliability, manufacturing, and supply chain, and needs a TPM who can turn cross-functional decisions into clear scope, executable milestones, and timely decisions. In this role, you will help the team converge on the right technical plan, surface risks early, and deliver reliable actuator systems on schedule. This role is based in San Francisco, CA and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role you will: Drive actuator programs end-to-end, aligning scope, milestones, interfaces, dependencies, and exit criteria across engineering teams. Drive scope lock and technical convergence for sprints, MVPs, and stretch goals while connecting component decisions to system performance. Coordinate actuator development across motors, gears, sensing, electronics, and firmware, and align the electrical and mechanical interfaces that connect actuators to the broader robot. Lead validation planning from early prototypes through engineering validation, reliability testing, and production readiness. Drive tradeoff decisions across cost, quality, performance, schedule, and lead time by collaborating cross-functionally and quantifying impact to meet program deliverables. Establish effective mechanisms for technical reviews, change control, design releases, decision tracking, and manufacturing readiness.

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 The Future of Computing Research team is an applied research team in the Consumer Devices group focused on developing new methods and models to support our vision as we advance forward in our mission of building AGI that benefits all of humanity. About the Role As a Technical Lead on the Future of Computing Research team, you will work together with both the best ML researchers in the world and the greatest design talent of our generation to push the frontier of model capabilities. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We follow a hybrid model with 3 days a week in the office and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Evaluate and select silicon platforms (GPUs, NPUs, and specialized accelerators) for on-device and edge deployment of OpenAI models. Work closely with research teams to co-design model architectures that meet real-world deployment constraints such as latency, memory, power, and bandwidth. Analyze and model system performance, identifying tradeoffs between model design, memory hierarchy, compute throughput, and hardware capabilities. Partner with hardware vendors and internal infrastructure teams to bring up new accelerators and ensure efficient execution of transformer workloads. Build and lead a team of engineers responsible for implementing the low-level inference stack, including kernel development and runtime systems. Run through the necessary walls to take nascent research capabilities and turn them into capabilities we can build on top of. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience evaluating or deploying workloads on GPUs, NPUs, or other specialized accelerators. Understand the performance characteristics of transformer models, including attention, KV-cache behavior, and memory bandwidth requirements. Have designed or optimized high-performance compute systems, such as inference engines, distributed runtimes, or hardware-aware ML pipelines. Have experience building or leading teams work

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 OPPORTUNITY We are looking for Senior Software Engineers to join our team. This is a specialized, high-impact role sitting at the intersection of high-performance computing (HPC) and Large Language Model (LLM) engineering. You will not just be building the automated "speedometer and diagnostic" suite for our next-generation AI infrastructure; you will be defining the roadmap, driving key technical decisions, and taking full ownership of the future of this work. RESPONSIBILITIES Benchmarking : Evaluate, run and automate standard LLM quality benchmarks (GSM8K, MMLU) alongside custom performance suites for specific workloads (e.g., long-context window, KV cache reuse, disaggregated serving). DevEx Improvement : Develop and maintain internal GPU-enabled development environments (similar to GitHub Codespaces). You will ensure the team has seamless, high-performance "dev machines" optimized for model experimentation. Tool Development : Build and contribute to open-source tools such as InferenceMAX and genai-bench to automate model evaluation, benchmarking and analysis. System Profiling : Use profilers like PyTorch Profiler, NVIDIA Nsight Systems and py-spy to collect performance profiles, identify bottlenecks, and debug the compute/networking stack. Monitoring & Observability : Develop real-time dashboards and alerts to monitor system health, model startup times, and runtime performance. Continuous Integration : Auto

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Software Engineer at on the Training Infrastructure team, you'll architect and lead development of our training platform, supporting top tier research engineers and model developers. You'll make key technical decisions for the infrastructure enabling developers to deploy, scale, and monitor their workloads with high performance and reliability. You’ll own scheduling, storage, networking, reliability, and observability of technical systems in the training stack EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at what we’ve built so far: Overview of the product so far Training docs overview Story of the Training product Research we've done RESPONSIBILITIES Design and architect scalable infrastructure systems for our ML training platform (e.g. scheduling, storage, and networking) Partner closely with developers and research engineers to translate complex training requirements into technical solutions Design and architect a global training scheduler Design and architect reinforcement learning systems and continuous learning pipelines Drive long-term improvements to improve reliability of systems and velocity of development Partner closely with SRE and Capacity teams to unlock state of the art training infrastructure Make critical architectural decisions balancing performance with system reliability Lead technical discussions and mentor junior engineers on infrastructure best practices Contribute to long-term technical strateg

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 people's lives. About the Role We are seeking a lead thermal simulation engineer to help accelerate the design and development of next-generation robotic systems through modeling, simulation, and analysis. You will work closely with mechanical, electrical, controls, and robotics engineers to evaluate designs before hardware is built, identify risks early, and guide critical architecture decisions. This role spans structural and thermal analysis and design across robotic subsystems including actuators, mechanisms, structures, electronics, and integrated systems. You will develop simulation workflows that improve engineering velocity, increase confidence in design decisions, and help us build more capable, reliable, and manufacturable robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. This role will be expected to be in office 4 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Perform thermal simulations to assess heat generation, cooling strategies, thermal interfaces, and system-level thermal performance Partner with mechanical, electrical, and controls engineers to influence design decisions early in development Build simulation models to evaluate robotic actuators, transmissions, mechanisms, structures, soft goods, and integrated assemblies Correlate simulation results with physical testing and develop methodologies to improve model accuracy Support architecture trade studies by evaluating design concepts before hardware is built Develop simulation workflows, standards, and best practices that scale across the robotics o

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 Power Engineer to characterize, measure, and optimize power consumption across our embedded hardware products. In this role, you will work closely with Electrical Engineering and system software teams to build power test automation, measure subsystem-level power usage, and drive improvements that directly impact battery life, thermal behavior, charging performance, and system reliability. You will help establish the methodologies and metrics used to understand and improve power efficiency across real-world product experiences, from controlled lab environments to representative day-in-the-life usage scenarios. This role requires hands-on experience with embedded hardware platforms, power instrumentation, and the analysis of power profiles and system behavior. 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: Define and develop power testing automation to evaluate system behavior across a range of workloads and operating conditions. Measure subsystem-level power consumption using power breakout probes and other lab instrumentation. Develop and execute power characterization tests spanning basic workloads, complex mixed-use scenarios, and representative day-of-use experiences. Partner closely with Electrical Engineers to identify opportunities to improve system power efficiency. Collaborate with software engineering

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 4 days onsite/week). Relocation assistance available. About the Team: We build foundational platform software that enables reliable, secure, and performant products. The team works across system layers and partners closely with adjacent engineering groups to deliver robust capabilities from concept through launch. About the Role: We’re seeking a System Software Engineer to design, implement, and debug core platform components and the pipelines that build and update system images. You’ll work across operating system layers, focusing on performance, security, and deep system debugging to ship production‑grade systems. In this role, you will: Design, implement, and debug system‑level components and services across kernel and user space. Configure and maintain OS platform services (init, services, networking, security policies) and related tooling. Build and operate image and update pipelines, ensuring reliability, reproducibility, and rollback safety. Instrument and analyze performance using profiling and tracing; optimize CPU, memory, I/O, and power usage. Own platform observability and reliability: logging, crash capture, watchdogs, and diagnostics. Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to define interfaces and deliver end‑to‑end features. Establish strong engineering practices: code review, CI, reproducible builds, and release management. Partner with external suppliers to support builds and deployments. You might thrive in this role if you: Have shipped production systems software on modern operating systems. Are proficient in C/C++ and a scripting language, and comfortable with OS internals (concurrency, memory management, filesystems, networking, power management). Bring strong systems debugging skills using debuggers, tracers, profilers, and logs across kernel/user‑space boundaries. Understand configuration of platform services and interfaces, and can translate requirements into stable, well‑documented APIs. Are fluent in u

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're looking for an Optical Interconnect System Engineer to design, qualify, and deploy scalable optical connectivity for large-scale AI infrastructure. This role spans fiber-system architecture, optical-mechanical integration, validation, reliability, deployment, and serviceability. You will work with optical, mechanical, electrical, networking, manufacturing, reliability, and data-center teams to translate system needs into practical interconnect solutions. This is a hands-on role for someone who can connect design decisions with installation, qualification, troubleshooting, and long-term operational performance. In this role, you will: Define optical interconnect architectures and requirements across hardware platforms and rack-level systems. Design high-density fiber systems for performance, density, reliability, installation, and serviceability. Lead optical-mechanical integration and cross-functional design reviews. Develop test and qualification plans for optical components, modules, switching platforms, and integrated systems. Own optical loss budgets, routing guidelines, handling requirements, and serviceability criteria. Support system bring-up, deployment, troubleshooting, failure analysis, and reliability improvement. Create reusable design guidelines, interface requirements, and qualification methods. You might thrive in this role if you have: Core experience Experience desi

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,

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 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 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 As an Engineer on our hardware optimization and co-design team, you will co-design future hardware from different vendors for programmability and performance. You will work with our kernel, compiler and machine learning engineers to understand their unique needs related to ML techniques, algorithms, numerical approximations, programming expressivity, and compiler optimizations. You will evangelize these constraints with various vendors to develop and influence future hardware architectures towards efficient training and inference on our models. If you are excited about efficiently distributing a large language model across devices, dealing with and optimizing system-wide/rack-wide networking bottlenecks and eventually tailoring the compute pipe and memory hierarchy of the hardware platform, simulating workloads at different abstractions and working closely with our partners, this is the perfect opportunity! 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. Key Responsibilities Co-design future hardware for programmability and performance with our hardware vendors Assist hardware vendors in developing optimal kernels and add support for it in our compiler Develop performance estimates for critical kernels for different hardware configurations and drive decisions on compute core and memory h

About the Team ChatGPT is a rapidly evolving system: new capabilities ship continuously, product surfaces change quickly, and usage patterns shift week-to-week. Supporting that pace requires infrastructure that can handle real production constraints—high concurrency, unpredictable traffic patterns, complex dependency graphs, and frequent change. The ChatGPT Infrastructure team builds and operates the platforms that enable fast iteration without compromising performance or reliability. We design shared systems, data paths, rollout mechanisms, and reliability guardrails that teams rely on to ship changes to ChatGPT at scale. We focus on high-leverage infrastructure: primitives and “golden paths” that incorporate operational lessons as defaults, so engineers don’t need to rediscover failure modes, latency pitfalls, or integration issues each time they build something new. About the Role We’re hiring Senior and Staff Engineers to design and build infrastructure systems that underlie ChatGPT and multiply the effectiveness of teams building user experiences. This is not a support-only role. It’s a platform-building role: you’ll define interfaces, develop core abstractions, and create tooling to make safe, fast iteration the norm. Your work will reduce friction, prevent regressions, improve performance, and ensure systems scale gracefully as the product grows. Where You Can Have Impact You might work on one or more of the following areas (without being restricted to any single area): Platform foundations & frameworks: Core libraries, service frameworks, and shared components that standardize system building, integration, and evolution. Scalability & performance primitives: Patterns and infrastructure that reduce tail latency, improve throughput, and keep costs predictable as demand increases. Reliability guardrails: Mechanisms that prevent outages by design—rate limiting, load shedding, dependency isolation, backpressure, safe fallbacks, and robust regression contr