Systems Generalist, GPT Infrastructure

About the Position

Systems Generalist, GPT Infrastructure

We are seeking an experienced systems generalist to join our GPT Infrastructure team at OpenAI. This role is pivotal in building an automated inference optimization platform, combining software engineering fundamentals with systems thinking and performance intuition.

Location

• San Francisco
• Seattle

Employment Type

• Full time

Location Type

• Hybrid

Compensation

• $293K – $445K • Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate durable APIs and control-plane services for multi-hour or multi-day optimization campaigns, including scheduling, retries, budgets, checkpoints, artifact lineage, and observability.
• Build secure partner-side runner and grader software that can compile, execute, verify, and benchmark candidate artifacts on third-party accelerator hardware.
• Integrate hardware profiles, ISA and toolchain context, compilers, runtimes, and inference-serving engines into a repeatable optimization workflow.
• Turn research prototypes into reliable product surfaces with clear contracts, debuggable failure modes, reproducible outputs, and excellent developer ergonomics.
• Develop correctness and performance evaluation systems spanning latency, throughput, memory use, utilization, and cost efficiency.
• Build artifact, provenance, and qualification workflows that make optimized kernels, binaries, configurations, and reports safe to review and deploy.
• Collaborate with Research, Inference Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, Product, and Strategic Partnerships to deliver production-ready solutions.
• Drive technical architecture and execution across ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives that connect OpenAI systems with partner environments.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building large-scale distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, or cloud services, or equivalent depth of experience.
• Strong programming skills in one or more of C++, Python, Go, or Rust.
• Experience designing and operating highly available backend systems, APIs, job orchestration systems, or durable workflows for production workloads.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, Linux, networking, storage, containers, and modern cloud architectures.
• Experience debugging complex systems and using measurement, profiling, and benchmarks to guide engineering decisions.
• Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives as a senior individual contributor and work effectively across organizational boundaries.

Nice to Have

• Experience with AI infrastructure, inference-serving systems, or large-scale machine learning systems.
• Experience with compilers, runtimes, kernel optimization, or performance engineering; familiarity with technologies such as LLVM, MLIR, Triton, CUDA, or ROCm is a plus.
• Familiarity with GPUs, accelerators, hardware architecture, ISA concepts, or vendor toolchains.
• Experience with inference-serving frameworks or engines such as vLLM, SGLang, Triton Inference Server, or similar systems.
• Experience building developer platforms, external APIs, remote execution systems, or secure partner-facing infrastructure.
• Experience working with strategic cloud, hardware, or infrastructure partners.

We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Generous equity
• Performance-related bonuses
• Comprehensive benefits package

About the Company

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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