Software Engineer, Kernel Performance & AI Tooling

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI research company in San Francisco is seeking a Systems Engineer focused on kernel optimization and AI-assisted workflows. You'll develop tooling to improve performance, debug infrastructures, and collaborate across teams to enhance production kernels. The ideal candidate has strong systems engineering experience and a background in performance optimization, particularly in low-level software. Join us in shaping the future of AI development while ensuring its benefits are maximized for all.

Qualifications

• Strong systems or tooling engineering experience, background in low-level software.
• Experience with developer tooling, debugging infrastructure, or workflow design.
• Depth in kernel development, accelerator architecture, or compiler systems.

Responsibilities

• Build developer tooling to optimize kernel development and performance.
• Develop observability infrastructure for AI-assisted optimization.
• Optimize production kernels through problem formulation and analysis.
• Design systems that accelerate kernel optimization and validation.

Skills

Systems engineering experience

Low-level software performance optimization

Developer tooling

Kernel development

AI-assisted systems

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system‑level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team is responsible for building the next generation of AI‑native silicon while working closely with software and research partners to co‑design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering production‑grade silicon for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team also creates custom design tools and methodologies that accelerate innovation and enable hardware optimised specifically for AI.

About the Role

We are looking for a systems‑minded engineer to help advance our kernel development, performance engineering, and hardware‑software co‑design capabilities, with a particular focus on AI‑assisted workflows and tooling. This person will work at the intersection of kernel optimisation, developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure, helping us improve both how production kernels are built and optimised, and how future hardware‑software systems are designed and evaluated. The role is ideal for someone who is excited by low‑level performance work, but also sees AI and automation as powerful tools for accelerating engineering velocity. You will help define the future of kernel engineering in the era of AI‑assisted development.

In this role, you may:

• Build developer tooling and workflows that make kernel development and performance optimisation faster, more scalable, and easier to debug, integrate, and deploy.
• Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure that makes AI‑assisted optimisation systems more interpretable, reliable, and effective.
• Optimise production kernels end to end by formulating optimisation problems, running search loops, analysing bottlenecks, debugging generated implementations, and landing improvements into production.
• Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems that accelerate kernel optimisation, correctness validation, and hardware‑software co‑design.
• Improve AI‑assisted optimisation systems for specialised tasks through better datasets, evaluations, benchmarking, and research infrastructure.
• Partner across research and engineering teams to turn new ideas into practical systems spanning production needs and long‑term infrastructure strategy.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Strong systems or tooling engineering experience, with a background in low‑level software, performance optimisation, or infrastructure.
• Experience with developer tooling, debugging infrastructure, profiling, observability, or workflow design for technical users.
• Depth in kernel development, accelerator architecture, compiler systems, or related performance‑critical domains.
• Familiarity with AI‑assisted systems, agentic workflows, post‑training, or reinforcement learning for engineering or research applications.
• Strong experimental judgement, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to move fluidly between research exploration and production execution.
• Interest in compilers, DSLs, program synthesis, or AI for systems.

Preferred profile

The ideal candidate is a strong systems and tooling engineer with real depth in kernels and accelerators. They are comfortable working across software and hardware boundaries, can reason deeply about performance, abstractions, and system design, and have hands‑on experience optimising code for GPUs, high‑performance CPUs, or custom accelerators. They view AI not as the end product, but as a force multiplier for engineering productivity and system optimisation.

To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.

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 we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.