Chatgpt Performance Engineer

Details

About the Team

We bring OpenAI's technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API.

We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.

About the Role

OpenAI is looking for an experienced Performance Engineer to help us scale the performance, reliability, and efficiency of our systems. In this role, you'll apply deep technical expertise to optimize infrastructure and application-level performance across mission-critical products like ChatGPT and our developer API. You’ll work cross-functionally with teams building core services, training models, and developing real-time user experiences to push our latency, throughput, and cost-efficiency to the next level.

We are looking for engineers who thrive in ambiguous environments, value deep systems understanding, and are motivated by delivering measurable impact. This is a highly technical, individual contributor role focused on root-cause analysis, profiling, instrumentation, and architecture-level performance improvements across our stack.

Responsibilities

• Analyze and optimize performance across application, middleware, runtime, and infrastructure layers—networking, storage, Python runtime, GPU utilization, and beyond.
• Develop tooling and metrics that provide deep observability into system performance.
• Collaborate closely with infra, platform, training, and product teams to identify key performance goals and drive systemic improvements.
• Influence architecture and design decisions to prioritize latency, throughput, and efficiency at scale.
• Lead investigations into high-impact performance regressions or scalability issues in production.
• Drive performance testing strategies and help define SLAs/SLOs around latency and throughput for critical systems.

Requirements

• Have 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong track record in performance or reliability of high-scale distributed systems.
• Are deeply comfortable with performance profiling tools and tracing systems.
• Have experience optimizing performance across one or more layers of the stack (e.g., database, networking, storage, application runtime, GC tuning, Python/Golang internals, GPU utilization).
• Have a strong understanding of OS internals, scheduling, memory management, and IO patterns.
• Have contributed to observability, benchmarking, or performance-focused infrastructure at scale.
• Have demonstrated success navigating ambiguity and aligning stakeholders around performance goals.
• Value simplicity, rigor, and collaboration when solving complex systems problems.

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.