Software Engineer, Inference - Performance Optimization

About the Position

Software Engineer, Inference - Performance Optimization

San Francisco

About the Team

Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and analysis to understand where time and cost are spent, then turn that understanding into performance optimizations and models that project performance and capacity needs for future launches.

About the Role

In this role, you will model inference performance across application, model, and fleet layers with higher fidelity. You will build cost-to-serve estimates from microbenchmarks and create tools that help cross-functional teams reason about latency, capacity, utilization, and cost tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Build and refine performance models that translate microbenchmark results into cost-to-serve estimates.
• Analyze inference workloads end to end across applications, models, and fleet infrastructure.
• Enhance tooling to identify bottlenecks across layers for latency and throughput.
• Partner with other teams to turn performance insights into concrete improvements and project how future changes affect inference.

Requirements

• Enjoy reasoning from first principles about distributed systems, model inference, and hardware efficiency.
• Comfortable working across abstraction layers, from application behavior to kernels, accelerators, networking, and fleet scheduling.
• Deep expertise with performance profiling, benchmarking, analysis, and optimization.
• Enjoy collaborating with engineering and research teams to improve real production systems.

About the Company

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.

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