Software Engineer, Kernel Performance & AI Tooling
AI research and deployment company building and deploying frontier AI products, including ChatGPT, Codex, and its API platform.
Projects
About OpenAI
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It consists of the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group, a public benefit corporation governed by the Foundation.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will build developer tooling and observability infrastructure that speeds up kernel development and performance optimization. You will optimize production kernels end to end, design abstractions and automation for correctness validation and hardware-software co-design, and improve AI-assisted optimization systems through better datasets, evaluations and benchmarking. You will partner with research and engineering teams to turn ideas into practical systems.
Requirements
- Strong systems or tooling engineering experience in low-level software, performance optimization or infrastructure
- Experience with developer tooling, debugging infrastructure, profiling or observability
- Depth in kernel development, accelerator architecture or compiler systems
- Familiarity with AI-assisted systems, agentic workflows, post-training or reinforcement learning
- Hands-on experience optimizing code for GPUs, high-performance CPUs or custom accelerators (preferred)
- May need to meet legal status requirements under U.S. export control laws
Responsibilities
- Build developer tooling and workflows for kernel development and performance optimization
- Develop observability, diagnostics and validation infrastructure for AI-assisted optimization systems
- Optimize production kernels end to end by analyzing bottlenecks and landing improvements
- Design abstractions, interfaces and automation for kernel optimization and hardware-software co-design
- Improve AI-assisted optimization systems through datasets, evaluations and benchmarking
- Partner across research and engineering teams
Benefits
- Equity
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer HSA contributions
- Pre-tax Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA and commuter accounts
- 401(k) with employer match
- Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents, 20 weeks for non-birthing parents)
- Paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
- Flexible PTO for exempt employees
- 13+ paid company holidays and company office closures
- Paid sick or safe time
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend
- Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits
- Relocation support for eligible employees
- Charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
