Software Engineer, Kernel Performance & AI Tooling

Visa Hunt; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a systems-minded engineer to advance kernel development, performance engineering, and hardware-software co-design. You will work at the intersection of kernel optimization, developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure to improve production kernels and future hardware design.

The role emphasizes low-level performance work, AI-assisted workflows, and automation as tools to accelerate engineering velocity across teams and production systems.

Qualifications

• Strong systems or tooling engineering experience with a background in low-level software and performance optimization.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Build developer tooling and workflows that make kernel development and performance optimization faster, more scalable, and easier to debug, integrate, and deploy.
• Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure that makes AI-assisted optimization systems more interpretable, reliable, and effective.
• Optimize production kernels end to end by formulating optimization problems, running search loops, analyzing bottlenecks, debugging generated implementations, and landing improvements into production.
• Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems that accelerate kernel optimization, correctness validation, and hardware-software co-design.
• Improve AI-assisted optimization systems for specialized 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.

Skills

Strong systems

Tooling engineering

Low-level software

Performance optimization

AI-assisted workflows

Tools

Kernel development

Compiler systems

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform.

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 optimization, developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure, helping us improve both how production kernels are built and optimized, 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 optimization faster, more scalable, and easier to debug, integrate, and deploy.


• Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure that makes AI-assisted optimization systems more interpretable, reliable, and effective.


• Optimize production kernels end to end by formulating optimization problems, running search loops, analyzing bottlenecks, debugging generated implementations, and landing improvements into production.


• Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems that accelerate kernel optimization, correctness validation, and hardware-software co-design.


• Improve AI-assisted optimization systems for specialized 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 optimization, 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 judgment, 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 optimizing 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 optimization.

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.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affrimative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US‑based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non‑public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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