Accelerator Systems Software Engineer for AI Compute

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI’s Accelerators team is seeking engineers to evaluate and bring up new compute platforms that can support large-scale AI training and inference. You will prototype system software on accelerators and drive performance across AI workloads in a tightly integrated stack.

You’ll collaborate across hardware and software, developing kernels, sharding strategies, and scaling methods to enable frontier AI workloads at scale.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience working on AI infrastructure, including kernels, systems, or hardware-software co-design.
• Hands-on experience with accelerator platforms for AI at data center scale.
• Strong understanding of kernels, sharding, runtime systems, or distributed scaling techniques.
• Familiarity with optimizing LLMs, CNNs, or recommender models for hardware efficiency.
• Experience with performance modeling, system debugging, and software stack adaptation for novel architectures.
• Exposure to mobile accelerators is welcome, but data center-scale AI hardware experience is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Prototype and enable OpenAI's AI software stack on new, exploratory accelerator platforms.
• Optimize large-scale model performance 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 overlapping, and scaling efforts for frontier AI workloads.

Skills

AI infrastructure

Kernels

Sharding

Runtime systems

Distributed scaling

PyTorch

Performance modeling

Tools

TPUs

Custom silicon

Job description

OpenAI’s Accelerators team is seeking engineers to evaluate and bring up new compute platforms that can support large-scale AI training and inference. You will prototype system software on accelerators and drive performance across AI workloads in a tightly integrated stack.

You’ll collaborate across hardware and software, developing kernels, sharding strategies, and scaling methods to enable frontier AI workloads at scale.