Software Engineer, Trainium

Details

Our mission at OpenAI is to discover and enact the path to safe, beneficial AGI. The Scaling team builds performance-critical systems that allow OpenAI's models to run efficiently across a diverse set of AI accelerators, working across the inference stack from low-level kernels and compilers through model execution.

As a Software Engineer, Trainium, you will help bring OpenAI's inference workloads to AWS Trainium and build the software stack required to run cutting-edge frontier models efficiently on the platform. This deeply technical, cross-stack role spans kernels, compilers, and model execution.

Responsibilities

• Build and optimize OpenAI's inference stack for AWS Trainium.
• Develop high-performance kernels for critical model operations and workloads.
• Extend and improve compiler support to efficiently target Trainium hardware.
• Build the systems necessary to execute and optimize the model forward pass on Trainium.
• Profile workloads and identify bottlenecks across kernels, compiler-generated code, runtime, and model execution.
• Partner with inference and ML systems teams to bring new models and architectures onto Trainium.
• Work across the hardware/software boundary to unlock performance and capabilities from specialized AI accelerators.
• Own complex performance and systems problems end-to-end, from investigation through production deployment.

Requirements

• 3+ years of relevant engineering experience, ideally in ML systems, compilers, kernels, runtimes, or performance engineering.
• Strong systems programming fundamentals and experience writing performance-critical software.
• Experience working with GPU, TPU, Trainium, or other specialized accelerator architectures.
• Ability to reason about performance across multiple layers of the stack, from hardware and kernels through compilers and ML frameworks.
• Experience owning technically ambiguous problems end-to-end and learning new hardware and software domains as needed.
• Bonus: experience with AWS Trainium or the AWS Neuron SDK.
• Bonus: contributions to ML frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX, compiler infrastructure such as LLVM, MLIR, XLA, or Triton, or experience developing kernels for specialized accelerators.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of legally protected characteristics.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law. OpenAI is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families, 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 leave, medical leave, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, including flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and paid office closures.
• Paid sick or safe time as required by applicable law.
• 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 where eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

The base pay offered may vary depending on market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Total compensation also includes equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits.