AI Infra Systems Engineer — GPT Deployment & Optimization

OpenAI; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI seeks an experienced systems generalist to build an automated inference optimization platform across the stack. You will design the OpenAI‑hosted control plane and partner software that evaluates candidates on real accelerator hardware, keeping long‑running workflows reliable and results reproducible.

This deeply cross‑stack role blends software engineering fundamentals with performance intuition. You will collaborate with Research, Infrastructure, Security, Product, and partners to

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building large‑scale distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, or cloud services.
• Strong programming skills in one or more of C++, Python, Go, or Rust.
• Experience designing and operating highly available backend systems, APIs, job orchestration systems, or durable workflows for production workloads.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, Linux, networking, storage, containers, and modern cloud architectures.
• Experience debugging complex systems and using measurement, profiling, and benchmarks to guide engineering decisions.
• Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives as a senior individual contributor and work effectively across organizational boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate durable APIs and control‑plane services for multi‑hour or multi‑day optimization campaigns, including scheduling, retries, budgets, checkpoints, artifact lineage, and observability.
• Build secure partner‑side runner and grader software that can compile, execute, verify, and benchmark candidate artifacts on third‑party accelerator hardware.
• Integrate hardware profiles, ISA and toolchain context, compilers, runtimes, and inference‑serving engines into a repeatable optimization workflow.
• Turn research prototypes into reliable product surfaces with clear contracts, debuggable failure modes, reproducible outputs, and excellent developer ergonomics.
• Develop correctness and performance evaluation systems spanning latency, throughput, memory use, utilization, and cost efficiency.
• Build artifact, provenance, and qualification workflows that make optimized kernels, binaries, configurations, and reports safe to review and deploy.
• Collaborate with Research, Inference Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, Product, and Strategic Partnerships to deliver production‑ready solutions.
• Drive technical architecture and execution across ambiguous, cross‑functional initiatives that connect OpenAI systems with partner environments.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend APIs

C++

Python

Go

Rust

Tools

LLVM

MLIR

CUDA

Job description

OpenAI seeks an experienced systems generalist to build an automated inference optimization platform across the stack. You will design the OpenAI‑hosted control plane and partner software that evaluates candidates on real accelerator hardware, keeping long‑running workflows reliable and results reproducible.

This deeply cross‑stack role blends software engineering fundamentals with performance intuition. You will collaborate with Research, Infrastructure, Security, Product, and partners to