Software Engineer, GPT Infrastructure

📋 Job Overview

We are seeking a software engineer to help build the platform that qualifies and optimizes inference workloads across heterogeneous compute environments. The GPT Infrastructure team builds systems that turn advances in model inference and optimization into reliable production capabilities. We enable OpenAI workloads to be qualified and optimized across new accelerator platforms without requiring a one-off port and tuning effort for every hardware target.

🏢 About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory whose goal is to develop artificial intelligence in a safe and beneficial way. The organization conducts research in various topics of artificial intelligence such as machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing, often making its research available to the public.

🎯 The Role

You will develop both OpenAI-hosted services and secure partner-side software for running long-lived optimization workflows. These workflows generate candidate kernels, runtime configurations, and serving-stack changes; compile and execute them on target hardware; verify their correctness; measure their performance; and use the results to guide further optimization.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate APIs and control-plane services for long-running workload qualification and optimization campaigns, including scheduling, retries, checkpointing, resource budgets, and observability.
• Build secure partner-side execution and evaluation software that can compile, run, verify, profile, and benchmark candidate artifacts on accelerator hardware.
• Integrate model workloads, hardware profiles, compiler toolchains, runtimes, serving engines, and distributed-execution backends into a repeatable platform.
• Develop correctness and performance evaluation systems spanning output fidelity, latency, throughput, memory footprint, accelerator utilization, communication efficiency, scaling behavior, and cost efficiency.
• Automate the generation, evaluation, and improvement of kernels, runtime configurations, parallelization strategies, and serving-stack changes.
• Diagnose performance and correctness issues across model code, kernels, compilers, runtimes, memory systems, networking, collective communication, and hardware.
• Build artifact-management, provenance, regression-testing, and qualification workflows for kernels, binaries, configurations, evaluation results, and deployment reports.
• Turn experimental research workflows into reliable product surfaces with clear interfaces, actionable failure modes, and strong developer ergonomics.
• Collaborate with Research, Inference Engineering, Runtime and Compiler teams, Infrastructure, Security, Product, and Strategic Partnerships to onboard and optimize new compute platforms.
• Drive technical architecture and execution across ambiguous initiatives spanning OpenAI systems and partner environments.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, production services, developer platforms, or orchestration systems.
• Proficiency in one or more systems-oriented languages such as Python, C++, Go, or Rust.
• Experience designing and operating APIs, job orchestration systems, durable workflows, or large-scale backend services.
• Strong understanding of Linux, networking, storage, containers, distributed execution, and modern infrastructure architectures.
• Ability to reason about model execution and diagnose problems across software and hardware boundaries.
• Experience using profiling, tracing, benchmarking, and measurement to guide engineering decisions.
• Strong ownership and the ability to work effectively across research and engineering teams.

🎁 Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.