Software Engineer, Workload Enablement

OpenAI; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 293,000 - 455,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced Software Engineer in Seattle to enable production workloads and conduct end-to-end testing on cutting-edge platforms. Responsibilities include creating benchmark tests and validating workloads while ensuring stability and performance.

Candidates should have a BS in CS/EE, 5+ years in ML systems or distributed systems, and strong expertise in PyTorch. Join us in our mission to advance AI responsibly.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in ML systems, performance engineering, distributed systems, or HPC.
• Strong hands-on experience with PyTorch and large-scale distributed training concepts.
• Proficiency in Python plus comfort with C++/CUDA/HIP code is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Port and validate key inference and training workloads on new platforms/SKUs.
• Build benchmarks and stress tests capturing real E2E behavior.
• Partner with engineers to ensure platform stability and performance.

Skills

ML systems

performance engineering

distributed systems

HPC

PyTorch

Kubernetes

C++/CUDA/HIP

profiling/debugging

Education

BS in CS/EE or equivalent practical experience

Job description

About The Team

The Scaling team is responsible for the architectural and engineering backbone of OpenAI’s infrastructure. We design and deliver advanced systems that support the deployment and operation of cutting-edge AI models. Our work spans system software, networking, platform architecture, fleet-level monitoring, and performance optimization.

About The Role

We’re hiring an SW Engineer to enable production workloads and end-to-end testing on new platforms. This role will include creating new test harnesses and platform stress benchmarks, porting existing inference and training workloads to new, sometimes early-access, systems/hardware, analyzing performance and bottlenecks, and characterizing the end-to-end behavior of new systems (compute, comms, storage, control plane, and failure modes).

Key Responsibilities

• Port and validate key inference and training workloads on new platforms/SKUs as they arrive; drive correctness, performance, and stability to an internal readiness bar.
• Build a suite of benchmarks and stress tests that capture real E2E behavior of our workloads by exercising all aspects of a system, including CPU, GPU, memory subsystem, frontend, scale-up, and scale-out networking (including WAN traffic, NVlink and RDMA collectives), storage, thermals, and any other relevant parts.
• Deep-dive performance on distributed training/inference:
• Collective performance and tuning (across NCCL/RCCL and internal libraries)
• Overlap of compute/communication, kernel-level bottlenecks, memory bandwidth and scheduling effects
• Create repeatable test harnesses that run in CI / lab environments and produce actionable outputs (pass/fail, performance score, regression detection).
• Partner with systems + fleet bring-up engineers to ensure the platform is not only stable and performant, but also operationally usable and scalable (containerization, K8s integration, telemetry hooks, failure triage loops).
• Work cross-functionally with vendors and internal stakeholders by producing clear bug reports, minimal repros, and prioritized issue lists.

Qualifications

• BS in CS/EE (or equivalent practical experience).
• 5+ years in one or more of: ML systems, performance engineering, distributed systems, or HPC.
• Strong hands-on experience with:
• PyTorch and modern LLM training/inference stacks
• Large-scale distributed training concepts (data/model/pipeline parallel, collective comms)
• Experience with RDMA and debugging/optimizing comms libraries (NCCL or RCCL) and their interaction with hardware/network
• Proficiency in Python plus comfort reading/writing performance-critical code (C++/CUDA/HIP is a plus).
• Strong profiling/debugging skills (e.g., Nsight, rocprof, perf, flamegraphs; ability to reason from traces/counters).

Preferred Skills

• Experience building workload-shaped benchmarks and stress/fault tests that correlate to production behavior (not just synthetic loops or microbenchmarks).
• Familiarity with RDMA networking and transport tuning; understanding of how network topology and congestion impact collectives.
• Experience running and validating workloads in Kubernetes, and bridging “research code” into robust, repeatable infrastructure.
• Hands-on lab experience with early hardware (new NICs, new GPUs/accelerators, early racks).

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 Affirmative 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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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: $293K - $455K