Senior AI Systems Performance Engineer for ChatGPT & API

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced Performance Engineer to help scale performance, reliability, and efficiency of our systems across ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. You will apply deep technical expertise to optimize infrastructure and application-level performance in high-scale environments.

You will analyze, profile, and drive systemic improvements, collaborating with infra, platform, training, and product teams to reduce latency and costs while ensuring safety and reliability at scale.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software engineering with performance focus.
• Strong profiling and tracing experience.
• Experience optimizing latency, throughput, cost at scale.

Responsibilities

• Analyze and optimize performance across layers: networking, storage, Python runtime, GPU.
• Develop tooling and metrics for deep observability.
• Collaborate with infra, platform, training, and product teams.
• Influence architecture to prioritize latency and throughput.
• Lead investigations into high-impact performance regressions.
• Drive performance testing strategies and define SLAs/SLOs.

Skills

Performance profiling

Tracing systems

Distributed systems

OS internals

Observability

Cross-functional collaboration

Python/Golang internals

Tools

Python

Go

Profiling tools

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an experienced Performance Engineer to help scale performance, reliability, and efficiency of our systems across ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. You will apply deep technical expertise to optimize infrastructure and application-level performance in high-scale environments.

You will analyze, profile, and drive systemic improvements, collaborating with infra, platform, training, and product teams to reduce latency and costs while ensuring safety and reliability at scale.