Kernel & Performance Engineer, AI-Driven Tooling

Visa Hunt; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a systems-minded engineer to advance kernel development, performance engineering, and hardware-software co-design. You will work at the intersection of kernel optimization, developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure to improve production kernels and future hardware design.

The role emphasizes low-level performance work, AI-assisted workflows, and automation as tools to accelerate engineering velocity across teams and production systems.

Qualifications

• Strong systems or tooling engineering experience with a background in low-level software and performance optimization.
• Experience with developer tooling, debugging infrastructure, profiling, observability, or workflow design for technical users.
• Depth in kernel development, accelerator architecture, compiler systems, or related performance-critical domains.

Responsibilities

• Build developer tooling and workflows that make kernel development and performance optimization faster, more scalable, and easier to debug, integrate, and deploy.
• Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure that makes AI-assisted optimization systems more interpretable, reliable, and effective.
• Optimize production kernels end to end by formulating optimization problems, running search loops, analyzing bottlenecks, debugging generated implementations, and landing improvements into production.
• Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems that accelerate kernel optimization, correctness validation, and hardware-software co-design.
• Improve AI-assisted optimization systems for specialized tasks through better datasets, evaluations, benchmarking, and research infrastructure.
• Partner across research and engineering teams to turn new ideas into practical systems spanning production needs and long-term infrastructure strategy.

Skills

Strong systems

Tooling engineering

Low-level software

Performance optimization

AI-assisted workflows

Tools

Kernel development

Compiler systems

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a systems-minded engineer to advance kernel development, performance engineering, and hardware-software co-design. You will work at the intersection of kernel optimization, developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure to improve production kernels and future hardware design.

The role emphasizes low-level performance work, AI-assisted workflows, and automation as tools to accelerate engineering velocity across teams and production systems.