Software Engineer, Productivity - Model Performance

Department: Scaling

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $230K – $385K

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Team

We’re hiring software engineers to make OpenAI’s Model Performance teams more productive. These teams work on the systems, tooling, and infrastructure that help improve model performance across OpenAI’s training and inference workloads at frontier scale.

About the Role

We’re looking for an autonomous, high-ownership developer productivity engineer who cares deeply about helping other engineers move faster, safer, and with more confidence.

This role will sit within OpenAI’s Model Performance organization, contributing to developer infrastructure, CI systems, testing workflows, tooling, and broader performance infrastructure efforts. There is also a strong opportunity to contribute to the Triton project and help improve the systems that support performance-critical engineering work across OpenAI.

In this role you will:

• Improve development workflows for engineers working on model performance infrastructure

• Design and improve CI/CD, release, validation, and testing pipelines

• Build and maintain tools that improve reliability, iteration speed, and engineering confidence

• Partner closely with engineers to identify friction in testing, debugging, deployment, and development workflows

• Contribute to infrastructure efforts that support performance-critical training and inference systems

• Help improve developer experience across Python-heavy codebases and performance-oriented infrastructure

• Work in a high-context, ambiguous environment where ownership and good judgment matter

You might thrive in this role if:

• You are motivated by enabling the people around you and helping engineers do their best work

• You have strong experience with CI/CD, developer infrastructure, testing systems, tooling, or build/release workflows

• You are highly collaborative, empathetic, and comfortable partnering deeply with technical teams

• You are strong in Python and enjoy building reliable, scalable developer tools and infrastructure

• You have experience improving large-scale engineering workflows, especially around CI reliability, test infrastructure, and debugging velocity

• You are self-directed and comfortable operating with ambiguity

• You do not need direct inference or model performance experience, but you are excited to learn the domain and make the team meaningfully more effective

• Experience in the PyTorch ecosystem is highly relevant

• Experience with C++ or Rust is a nice-to-have, but not required

• When you see repeated friction — slow tests, flaky CI, brittle release processes, painful debugging, unclear validation — your instinct is to fix the underlying system

• You are pragmatic and know how to balance high standards with forward progress

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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