Hardware-Focused Software Engineer for AI Systems

OpenAI; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a software engineer on the Scaling team to build and optimize the low‑level stack coordinating computation and data movement across supercomputing clusters. You will design high‑performance runtimes, contribute to compiler infrastructure, and develop scalable simulation systems for distributed training workloads.

You will work at the intersection of systems programming, ML infrastructure, and HPC, balancing usability with stability and performance on a growing hardware fleet.

Qualifications

• Proficient in systems programming (Rust, C++) and Python.
• Experience with compiler development, kernel authoring, or runtime systems is a plus.
• Familiarity with distributed systems or high‑performance simulation is desirable.

Responsibilities

• Design and build APIs and runtime components to orchestrate computation and data movement across heterogeneous ML workloads.
• Contribute to compiler infrastructure and develop optimizations and passes to support evolving hardware.
• Engineer and optimize compute and data kernels for correctness and high performance across simulation and production environments.
• Profile and optimize system bottlenecks around I/O, memory hierarchy, and interconnects at local and distributed scales.
• Develop simulation infrastructure to validate runtime behaviors and support hardware development.
• Rapidly deploy runtime and compiler updates to new supercomputing builds in collaboration with hardware and research teams.
• Work across a diverse stack, primarily using Rust and Python, with opportunities to influence architecture decisions.

Skills

Rust

C++

Python

Systems programming

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a software engineer on the Scaling team to build and optimize the low‑level stack coordinating computation and data movement across supercomputing clusters. You will design high‑performance runtimes, contribute to compiler infrastructure, and develop scalable simulation systems for distributed training workloads.

You will work at the intersection of systems programming, ML infrastructure, and HPC, balancing usability with stability and performance on a growing hardware fleet.