ChatGPT Performance Engineer

at OpenAI

📍 United States
📍 New York City, United States
📍 San Francisco, United States
📍 Seattle, United States

USD 325,000-405,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote ✅ On-site

✅ Relocation

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI API @ 4 ChatGPT @ 4 Distributed Systems @ 7 GPU @ 4 Go Networking @ 4 Observability @ 4 Profiling @ 3 Python @ 4

Details

OpenAI is seeking an experienced Performance Engineer to scale the performance, reliability, and efficiency of systems supporting ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. This highly technical individual contributor role focuses on root-cause analysis, profiling, instrumentation, and architecture-level performance improvements across application, middleware, runtime, and infrastructure layers.

About the Team

The Applied AI team brings OpenAI's technology to the world through products such as ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. The team learns from deployment and distributes the benefits of AI while ensuring that these powerful tools are used responsibly and safely.

Responsibilities

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

Requirements

7+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record in performance or reliability for high-scale distributed systems.
Deep familiarity with performance profiling tools and tracing systems.
Experience optimizing one or more layers of the stack, such as databases, networking, storage, application runtimes, garbage collection, Python or Golang internals, and GPU utilization.
Strong understanding of operating system internals, scheduling, memory management, and I/O patterns.
Experience contributing to observability, benchmarking, or performance-focused infrastructure at scale.
Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity and align stakeholders around performance goals.
Commitment to simplicity, rigor, and collaboration when solving complex systems problems.

Benefits

Base salary of $325,000–$405,000 per year, plus equity.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by law.
Mental health and wellness support.
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
Annual learning and development stipend.
Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
Relocation support for eligible employees.
Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.