Product Performance Engineer

Details

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.

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 / Qualifications

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

Benefits

• Base pay range listed below; total compensation may include equity and performance-related bonus(es).
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave; paid time off and company holidays.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend; daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends) may be provided.

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. We are an equal opportunity employer and provide reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

(Recruiting and compliance notes from the original posting retained.)