Software Engineer, Accelerators

Department: Scaling

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $295K – $380K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Team

The Kernels team at OpenAI builds the low-level software that accelerates our most ambitious AI research.

We work at the boundary of hardware and software, developing high-performance kernels, distributed system optimizations, and runtime improvements to make large-scale training and inference more efficient.

Our work enables OpenAI to push the limits by ensuring models - from LLMs to recommender systems - to run reliably on advanced supercomputing platforms. That includes adapting our software stack to new types of accelerators, tuning system performance end-to-end, and removing bottlenecks across every layer of the stack.

About the Role

On the Accelerators team, you will help OpenAI evaluate and bring up new compute platforms that can support large-scale AI training and inference.

Your work will range from prototyping system software on new accelerators to enabling performance optimizations across our AI workloads.

You’ll work across the stack, collaborating with both hardware and software aspects - working on kernels, sharding strategies, scaling across distributed systems, and performance modeling.

You'll help adapt OpenAI's software stack to non-traditional hardware and drive efficiency improvements in core AI workloads. This is not a compiler-focused role, rather bridging ML algorithms with system performance - especially at scale.

In this role, you will:

• Prototype and enable OpenAI's AI software stack on new, exploratory accelerator platforms.

• Optimize large-scale model performance (LLMs, recommender systems, distributed AI workloads) for diverse hardware environments.

• Develop kernels, sharding mechanisms, and system scaling strategies tailored to emerging accelerators.

• Collaborate on optimizations at the model code level (e.g. PyTorch) and below to enhance performance on non-traditional hardware.
  Perform system-level performance modeling, debug bottlenecks, and drive end-to-end optimization.

• Work with hardware teams and vendors to evaluate alternatives to existing platforms and adapt the software stack to their architectures.

• Contribute to runtime improvements, compute/communication overlapping, and scaling efforts for frontier AI workloads.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 3+ years of experience working on AI infrastructure, including kernels, systems, or hardware-software co-design

• Hands-on experience with accelerator platforms for AI at data center scale (e.g., TPUs, custom silicon, exploratory architectures).

• Strong understanding of kernels, sharding, runtime systems, or distributed scaling techniques.

• Familiarity with optimizing LLMs, CNNs, or recommender models for hardware efficiency.

• Experience with performance modeling, system debugging, and software stack adaptation for novel architectures.

• Exposure to mobile accelerators is welcome, but experience enabling data center-scale AI hardware is preferred.

• Ability to operate across multiple levels of the stack, rapidly prototype solutions, and navigate ambiguity in early hardware bring-up phases

• Interest in shaping the future of AI compute through exploration of alternatives to mainstream accelerators.

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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