Performance Engineer, Scalable AI Systems

Coinscapture; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced Performance Engineer to scale performance, reliability, and efficiency across OpenAI's systems, including ChatGPT and API services. The role focuses on root-cause analysis, profiling, instrumentation, and architecture-level improvements in a highly technical, individual contributor capacity.

Ideal candidates thrive in ambiguous environments, have deep systems understanding, and are motivated by measurable impact, with collaboration across infra, platform,

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong track record in performance or reliability of high-scale distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Analyze and optimize performance across application, middleware, runtime, and infrastructure layers (networking, storage, Python runtime, GPU utilization).
• Develop tooling and metrics that provide deep observability into system performance.
• Collaborate with infra, platform, training, and product teams to identify key performance goals and drive systemic improvements.
• Influence architecture and design decisions to prioritize latency, throughput, and efficiency at scale.
• Lead investigations into high-impact performance regressions or scalability issues in production.
• Drive performance testing strategies and help define SLAs/SLOs around latency and throughput for critical systems.

Skills

Performance engineering

Profiling tools

Observability

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Profiling tools

Tracing systems

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an experienced Performance Engineer to scale performance, reliability, and efficiency across OpenAI's systems, including ChatGPT and API services. The role focuses on root-cause analysis, profiling, instrumentation, and architecture-level improvements in a highly technical, individual contributor capacity.

Ideal candidates thrive in ambiguous environments, have deep systems understanding, and are motivated by measurable impact, with collaboration across infra, platform,