Software Engineer - Power Management, Hardware Health

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware Health team is dedicated to ensuring the optimal performance and reliability of our custom-built hyperscale supercomputers. We focus on maximizing supercomputing capacity for research and ensuring that our researchers are minimally impacted by hardware faults. This team is critical in maintaining the infrastructure that supports cutting-edge AI research at OpenAI.

The Hardware Health team operates within the broader Platform organization, which is incubated inside OpenAI’s Research team. Our work is on the front lines of innovation, supporting the engineering and research required to train large-scale AI models of unprecedented capability.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer on the Hardware Health team focused on power management, you will work on critical infrastructure to support cutting-edge research. With large-scale supercomputers consuming substantial amounts of power, managing this efficiently is key to maximizing computational capacity.  This role is critical to ensuring that our cutting-edge research supercomputing infrastructure runs smoothly, while maintaining reliability and grid-level power stability.

Our team empowers strong engineers with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, as well as ability to effect change. This role will require a keen focus on system-level comprehensive investigations and the development of automated solutions. We want people who go deep on problems, investigate as thoroughly as possible, and build automation for detection and remediation at scale. 

In this role, you will:

• Develop and implement system-level and software-level solutions to optimize power usage in large-scale supercomputers, ensuring efficient and reliable operations.

• Build automation to monitor power consumption patterns during training workloads and design algorithms to stabilize these fluctuations, preventing issues with grid reliability.

• Work with researchers and engineers to design tools for real-time monitoring, detection, and remediation of power-related hardware and system faults.

• Collaborate cross-functionally to translate complex electrical system requirements into code, while driving continuous improvements in power management solutions.

• Drive the development of power throttling mechanisms at the IT system level to dynamically adjust power usage based on workload demands and infrastructure limitations.

• Collaborate with hardware design teams to integrate system-level power control requirements into IT hardware design, ensuring seamless coordination between software-driven power management and hardware capabilities.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on solving large-scale, system-level challenges.

• Strong proficiency in Python and familiarity with automation and scripting tools (e.g., shell scripting).

• Experience with distributed systems to efficiently aggregate and analyze streaming data.

• Knowledge of electrical engineering concepts including digital signal processing, power systems, Fast Fourier Transforms, or related areas.

• Experience in system-level investigations and development of automated solutions to address power management, fault detection, and remediation.

• Strong analytical skills and the ability to dig into noisy data (experience with SQL, PromQL, Pandas, etc.).

• Comfort working with both hardware and software teams to solve multidisciplinary problems.

Bonus points if you have:

• Deep expertise with the power characteristics of synchronous workloads (as seen in supercomputing or model training environments).

• Knowledge of power control requirements in IT hardware design, with the ability to drive cross-functional collaboration to integrate power management features into hardware systems effectively.

• Working knowledge of control system fundamentals and how physical systems respond to control strategies. 

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. 

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