Strategic Overview
Software Engineer, Inference - Performance Optimization at OpenAI is a dev opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as About the Team Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and analysis to understand where time and….
The role is listed for San Francisco with the working arrangement published with the role, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying. Relevant signals in the listing include Scaling, Inference.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
About the Team Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and analysis to understand where time and cost are spent, then turn that understanding into performance optimizations and models that project performance and capacity needs for future launches. About the…
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. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the…
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- About the Team Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and analysis to understand where time and cost are spent, then turn that understanding into performance…
- Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for…
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $266K – $500K
Salary Benchmark
This role’s published compensation is compared with current employer-disclosed salary ranges for the same role in the same currency.
Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database and excludes this listing. It is not a third-party salary estimate, and currencies are not converted.
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
About the Team
Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and analysis to understand where time and cost are spent, then turn that understanding into performance optimizations and models that project performance and capacity needs for future launches.
About the Role
In this role, you will model inference performance across application, model, and fleet layers with higher fidelity. You will build cost-to-serve estimates from microbenchmarks and create tools that help cross-functional teams reason about latency, capacity, utilization, and cost tradeoffs.
In this role, you will
Build and refine performance models that translate microbenchmark results into cost-to-serve estimates.
Analyze inference workloads end to end across applications, models, and fleet infrastructure. Enhance tooling to identify bottlenecks across layers for latency and throughput.
Partner with other teams to turn performance insights into concrete improvements and project how future changes affect inference.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Enjoy reasoning from first principles about distributed systems, model inference, and hardware efficiency.
Are comfortable working across abstraction layers, from application behavior to kernels, accelerators, networking, and fleet scheduling.
Have deep expertise with performance profiling, benchmarking, analysis, and optimization.
Enjoy collaborating with engineering and research teams to improve real production systems.
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. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This dev opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches Scaling, Inference. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly About the Team Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and… — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground Scaling, Inference, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
We organize source-provided information into this independent job-seeker overview. Compensation is shown only when the source provides it; the official listing remains the authority for current requirements and application instructions.