Senior AI Inference Infrastructure Engineer

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 293,000 - 445,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced software engineer to join the GPT Infrastructure team and help build an automated inference optimization platform that scales research prototypes into production‑ready solutions.

You will design durable APIs and control‑plane services, integrate hardware and software toolchains, and collaborate across Research, Infrastructure, Security, and Partnerships to deliver reliable, observable systems with strong developer ergonomics.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience in large-scale distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, or cloud services.
• Strong programming skills in C++, Python, Go, or Rust.
• Experience designing and operating highly available backend systems, APIs, or durable workflows for production workloads.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, Linux, networking, storage, containers, and modern cloud architectures.
• Experience debugging complex systems with measurement, profiling, and benchmarks.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate durable APIs and control‑plane services for multi‑hour or multi‑day optimization campaigns, including scheduling, retries, budgets, checkpoints, artifact lineage, and observability.
• Build secure partner‑side runner and grader software to compile, execute, verify, and benchmark candidate artifacts on third‑party accelerator hardware.
• Integrate hardware profiles, ISA and toolchain context, compilers, runtimes, and inference‑serving engines into a repeatable optimization workflow.
• Turn research prototypes into reliable product surfaces with clear contracts, debuggable failure modes, reproducible outputs, and excellent developer ergonomics.
• Develop correctness and performance evaluation systems spanning latency, throughput, memory use, utilization, and cost efficiency.
• Build artifact, provenance, and qualification workflows that make optimized kernels, binaries, configurations, and reports safe to review and deploy.
• Collaborate with Research, Inference Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, Product, and Strategic Partnerships to deliver production‑ready solutions.
• Drive technical architecture and execution across ambiguous, cross‑functional initiatives that connect OpenAI systems with partner environments.

Skills

C++

Python

Go

Rust

Distributed systems

Backend APIs

Linux

Networking

Measurement & benchmarking

Senior IC leadership

Tools

LLVM

MLIR

Triton

CUDA

ROCm

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an experienced software engineer to join the GPT Infrastructure team and help build an automated inference optimization platform that scales research prototypes into production‑ready solutions.

You will design durable APIs and control‑plane services, integrate hardware and software toolchains, and collaborate across Research, Infrastructure, Security, and Partnerships to deliver reliable, observable systems with strong developer ergonomics.