System Performance Engineer, Consumer Devices

Details

OpenAI's Consumer Devices team is building AI-powered products that integrate hardware and software. The team works across embedded systems, machine learning, hardware, design, and product engineering to develop consumer technology products.

The System Performance Engineer will profile, benchmark, and optimize performance across embedded hardware products. The role works with operating systems, applications, camera and vision, graphics, and platform teams to define product KPIs, build performance tooling, and drive optimizations from early lab characterization through product launch and real-world usage. The position focuses on ensuring products remain responsive, efficient, and reliable throughout their lifecycle.

The role requires deep expertise in embedded or high-performance systems, strong operating systems fundamentals, and hands-on experience debugging under tight latency, power, and memory constraints.

Responsibilities

• Develop system performance benchmarks, methodologies, and policies to evaluate end-to-end product behavior.
• Profile and analyze performance across key product use cases and workloads using custom and industry-standard profiling tools.
• Partner with engineering teams to identify bottlenecks and drive performance optimizations across the software stack.
• Define high-level product KPIs and establish measurement frameworks for launch readiness and performance monitoring throughout the product lifecycle.
• Measure, report, and track system responsiveness, memory utilization, cold boot performance, long-term stability, and behavior under constrained conditions such as thermal limits and low battery states.
• Investigate field performance regressions and drive issues to resolution using data-driven analysis.

Requirements

• Deep experience shipping embedded or high-performance systems on Linux, Android, or iOS devices.
• Strong proficiency in C/C++, Python, or Rust.
• Exceptional operating systems fundamentals, including process management, IPC, drivers, interrupts, power management, media frameworks, graphics, filesystems, and networking.
• Proven track record shipping real-time systems operating under tight latency, power, and memory constraints.
• Expertise with profiling and debugging tools such as Perfetto, GDB, LLDB, perf, ftrace, or Instruments.
• Experience building instrumentation, analytics, and performance tuning frameworks.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with statistics, experimentation methodologies, or data science concepts.
• Experience collaborating cross-functionally with embedded software, systems, camera and vision, audio, graphics, applications, and hardware teams.
• Experience defining product KPIs, benchmarking methodologies, and launch readiness metrics for hardware products.
• Experience investigating field performance regressions and driving fixes through cross-functional collaboration.

Benefits

• Base salary of $293,000–$325,000 per year, plus equity.
• 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, 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 include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

This role is based in San Francisco, California, and uses a hybrid work model of four days per week in the office and one day working remotely. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.