Software Engineer, Inference - Multi Modal

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 310,000 - 460,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative company is seeking a talented software engineer to join their dynamic Inference team. This role involves designing and implementing infrastructure for large-scale multimodal models, focusing on high-performance delivery of audio and image inputs. You'll collaborate closely with researchers and product teams to push the boundaries of AI technology, ensuring reliable production services. If you thrive in fast-paced environments and enjoy tackling complex challenges, this opportunity offers a chance to make a significant impact in the AI landscape.

Qualifications

• Experience with multimodal models and inference systems.
• Understanding of GPU performance dynamics with complex data.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement infrastructure for multimodal models.
• Optimize systems for low-latency audio and image processing.
• Collaborate with researchers and product teams.

Skills

Inference systems for LLMs

GPU-based ML workloads

Networking

Distributed compute

High-throughput data handling

Experimental research collaboration

Tools

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

Custom model parallel systems

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI's Inference team powers the deployment of our most advanced models - including our GPT models, 4o Image Generation, and Whisper - across a variety of platforms. Our work ensures these models are available, performant, and scalable in production, and we partner closely with Research to bring the next generation of models into the world. We're a small, fast-moving team of engineers focused on delivering a world-class developer experience while pushing the boundaries of what AI can do.

We're expanding into multimodal inference, building the infrastructure needed to serve models that handle image, audio, and other non-text modalities. These workloads are inherently more heterogeneous and experimental, involving diverse model sizes and interactions, more complex input/output formats, and tighter coordination with product and research.

About the Role

We're looking for a software engineer to help us serve OpenAI's multimodal models at scale. You'll be part of a small team responsible for building reliable, high-performance infrastructure for serving real-time audio, image, and other MM workloads in production.

This work is inherently cross-functional: you'll collaborate directly with researchers training these models and with product teams defining new modalities of interaction. You'll build and optimize the systems that let users generate speech, understand images, and interact with models in ways far beyond text.

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement inference infrastructure for large-scale multimodal models.

• Optimize systems for high-throughput, low-latency delivery of image and audio inputs and outputs.

• Enable experimental research workflows to transition into reliable production services.

• Collaborate closely with researchers, infra teams, and product engineers to deploy state-of-the-art capabilities.

• Contribute to system-level improvements including GPU utilization, tensor parallelism, and hardware abstraction layers.
  

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience building and scaling inference systems for LLMs or multimodal models.

• Have worked with GPU-based ML workloads and understand the performance dynamics of large models, especially with complex data like images or audio.

• Enjoy experimental, fast-evolving work and collaborating closely with research.

• Are comfortable dealing with systems that span networking, distributed compute, and high-throughput data handling.

• Have familiarity with inference tooling like vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or custom model parallel systems.

• Own problems end-to-end and are excited to operate in ambiguous, fast-moving spaces.
  

Nice to Have:

• Experience working with image generation or audio synthesis models in production.

• Exposure to distributed ML training or system-efficient model design.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.

OpenAI Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement

For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation Range: $310K - $460K