Platform Engineer for AI Inference & Optimization

OpenAI; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a software engineer to build the platform that qualifies and optimizes inference workloads across heterogeneous compute environments. You will develop OpenAI-hosted services and partner-side software for long‑lived optimization workflows, generating kernels and runtime configurations; you will compile, execute, and verify them on target hardware.

You will work across model architecture, distributed execution, compilers, runtimes, networking, and accelerator systems, turning

Qualifications

• Experience building distributed systems/infrastructure
• Proficiency in one of Python, C++, Go, or Rust
• Experience designing APIs, job orchestration, or large-scale backend services
• Strong knowledge of Linux, networking, storage, containers, and modern infra
• Ability to reason about model execution across software/hardware boundaries
• Experience with profiling, tracing, benchmarking to guide decisions

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate APIs and control-plane services for long-running workload qualification and optimization campaigns, including scheduling, retries, checkpointing, resource budgets, and observability.
• Build secure partner-side execution and evaluation software that can compile, run, verify, profile, and benchmark candidate artifacts on accelerator hardware.
• Integrate model workloads, hardware profiles, compiler toolchains, runtimes, serving engines, and distributed-execution backends into a repeatable platform.
• Develop correctness and performance evaluation systems spanning output fidelity, latency, throughput, memory footprint, accelerator utilization, communication efficiency, scaling behavior, and cost efficiency.
• Automate the generation, evaluation, and improvement of kernels, runtime configurations, parallelization strategies, and serving-stack changes.
• Diagnose performance and correctness issues across model code, kernels, compilers, runtimes, memory systems, networking, collective communication, and hardware.
• Build artifact-management, provenance, regression-testing, and qualification workflows for kernels, binaries, configurations, evaluation results, and deployment reports.
• Turn experimental research workflows into reliable product surfaces with clear interfaces, actionable failure modes, and strong developer ergonomics.
• Collaborate with Research, Inference Engineering, Runtime and Compiler teams, Infrastructure, Security, Product, and Strategic Partnerships to onboard and optimize new compute platforms.
• Drive technical architecture and execution across ambiguous initiatives spanning OpenAI systems and partner environments.

Skills

Distributed systems experience

Systems programming languages (Python,

Tools

CUDA

ROCm

Triton

LLVM

MLIR

vLLM

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a software engineer to build the platform that qualifies and optimizes inference workloads across heterogeneous compute environments. You will develop OpenAI-hosted services and partner-side software for long‑lived optimization workflows, generating kernels and runtime configurations; you will compile, execute, and verify them on target hardware.

You will work across model architecture, distributed execution, compilers, runtimes, networking, and accelerator systems, turning