Performance Modeling Engineer

OpenAI; United States; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work model

Job summary

OpenAI's Hardware organization seeks a Performance Modeling Engineer to develop tools that evaluate AI system performance and guide architectural decisions. The role partners with the Performance Modeling Lead and other teams to analyze behavior, run simulations, and quantify tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, and storage.

You will contribute to building modeling frameworks and applying them to real-world questions that impact system design and vendor decisions.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background.
• Experience with modeling or simulations.
• Interest in AI infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain performance modeling tools and frameworks.
• Build models to evaluate system behavior across: compute, memory, and interconnect subsystems distributed system scaling and bottlenecks.
• Run simulations and analytical models to support architectural tradeoff analysis.
• Collaborate with performance modeling lead and system architects to answer forward-looking design questions.
• Analyze and interpret modeling outputs, translating results into actionable insights.
• Validate models against real system measurements and workload behavior.
• Contribute to improving modeling fidelity, usability, and scalability.

Skills

Strong software engineering

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI's Hardware organization develops system and infrastructure solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. We work closely with architecture, infrastructure, and vendor teams to evaluate system performance and guide critical design decisions. Our team focuses on building and applying performance modeling frameworks to understand system behavior, quantify tradeoffs, and inform next-generation infrastructure design.

About the Role

We are seeking Performance Modeling Engineers to develop and apply modeling tools that evaluate AI system performance and inform architectural decisions. In this role, you will work closely with the Performance Modeling Lead and partner teams to analyze system behavior, run simulations or analytical models, and help quantify tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, and storage. You will contribute to building modeling frameworks and applying them to real-world questions that impact system design and vendor decisions. This role is well-suited for engineers with strong software or modeling backgrounds who are interested in developing deeper expertise in system architecture and AI infrastructure. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain performance modeling tools and frameworks.
• Build models to evaluate system behavior across: compute, memory, and interconnect subsystems distributed system scaling and bottlenecks.
• Run simulations and analytical models to support architectural tradeoff analysis.
• Collaborate with performance modeling lead and system architects to answer forward-looking design questions.
• Analyze and interpret modeling outputs, translating results into actionable insights.
• Validate models against real system measurements and workload behavior.
• Contribute to improving modeling fidelity, usability, and scalability.

Qualifications

Strong software engineeri