Software Engineer, Kernel Performance & AI Tooling

Details

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for advanced AI workloads. The team co-designs chips, systems, tools, and methodologies to support faster, more efficient, production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform.

The role focuses on kernel development, performance engineering, hardware-software co-design, and AI-assisted workflows and tooling. The engineer will work across kernel optimization, developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure to improve how production kernels are built and optimized and how future hardware-software systems are designed and evaluated.

Responsibilities

• Build developer tooling and workflows that make kernel development and performance optimization faster, more scalable, easier to debug, integrate, and deploy.
• Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure for making AI-assisted optimization systems more interpretable, reliable, and effective.
• Optimize production kernels end to end by formulating optimization problems, running search loops, analyzing bottlenecks, debugging generated implementations, and landing improvements into production.
• Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems that accelerate kernel optimization, correctness validation, and hardware-software co-design.
• Improve AI-assisted optimization systems for specialized tasks through better datasets, evaluations, benchmarking, and research infrastructure.
• Partner across research and engineering teams to turn new ideas into practical systems spanning production needs and long-term infrastructure strategy.

Requirements

• Strong systems or tooling engineering experience, with a background in low-level software, performance optimization, or infrastructure.
• Experience with developer tooling, debugging infrastructure, profiling, observability, or workflow design for technical users.
• Depth in kernel development, accelerator architecture, compiler systems, or related performance-critical domains.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted systems, agentic workflows, post-training, or reinforcement learning for engineering or research applications.
• Strong experimental judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to move between research exploration and production execution.
• Interest in compilers, domain-specific languages, program synthesis, or AI for systems.
• Experience optimizing code for GPUs, high-performance CPUs, or custom accelerators is valued.
• Comfort working across software and hardware boundaries and reasoning deeply about performance, abstractions, and system design.

Candidates may need to meet certain legal status requirements under U.S. export control laws and regulations.

Compensation And Benefits

• Base salary: $266,000–$445,000 per year.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health and dependent care expenses and commuter costs.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time.
• 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 taxable fringe benefits may be provided.