AI Infrastructure Performance Modeling Lead

Showcify; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work model

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Performance Modeling Lead in San Francisco, CA, to build and guide a small team and to develop frameworks that evaluate AI systems across multiple abstraction levels. The role requires strong judgment, ownership, and the ability to translate complex analyses into actionable guidance across hardware and infrastructure decisions.

You will shape reference architectures, vendor designs, and long-term infrastructure strategy, collaborating with ML, systems, and hardware teams to

Qualifications

• Experience owning or building performance modeling frameworks used to drive real system design decisions.
• Deep knowledge of AI/ML workloads, including training and/or inference at scale.
• Understand system-level tradeoffs across compute, memory, and networking in large-scale distributed systems.
• Comfortable working across abstraction layers—from workload behavior to hardware implementation.
• Experience using modeling (analytical or simulation) to inform architectural decisions.
• Operate in ambiguous problem spaces and turn open-ended questions into structured analysis.
• Communicate clearly and influence both internal teams and external partners.

Responsibilities

• Build and own a performance modeling framework/toolchain to evaluate AI systems across multiple levels of abstraction.
• Analyze and quantify architectural tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, storage, and system topology.
• Develop performance models to guide decisions on scale-up vs. scale-out architectures, interconnect design, and memory hierarchy.
• Translate modeling outputs into clear recommendations for internal teams and external hardware vendors.
• Influence reference designs and vendor roadmaps through data-driven insights.
• Partner with ML, systems, and hardware teams to understand workload characteristics and requirements.
• Lead and grow a small team (2–3 engineers), setting technical direction and high modeling rigor.
• Continuously improve modeling fidelity by validating against real system behavior and measurements.

Skills

Performance modeling

AI/ML workloads

System-level tradeoffs

Workload abstraction layers

Modeling approaches

Communication

Tools

NVLink

InfiniBand

Ethernet

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a Performance Modeling Lead in San Francisco, CA, to build and guide a small team and to develop frameworks that evaluate AI systems across multiple abstraction levels. The role requires strong judgment, ownership, and the ability to translate complex analyses into actionable guidance across hardware and infrastructure decisions.

You will shape reference architectures, vendor designs, and long-term infrastructure strategy, collaborating with ML, systems, and hardware teams to