Software Engineer, Kernel Performance & AI Tooling

About the Company

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.

Responsibilities

• Build developer tooling and workflows for kernel development and performance optimization
• Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure for AI-assisted optimization systems
• Optimize production kernels end to end by formulating optimization problems and analyzing bottlenecks
• Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems for hardware-software co-design
• Improve AI-assisted optimization systems through better datasets, evaluations, and benchmarking
• Partner across research and engineering teams to turn ideas into practical systems

Requirements

• Strong systems or tooling engineering experience in low-level software or performance optimization
• Experience with developer tooling, debugging infrastructure, profiling, or observability
• Depth in kernel development, accelerator architecture, or compiler systems
• Familiarity with AI-assisted systems, agentic workflows, or reinforcement learning
• Strong experimental judgment and comfort with ambiguity
• Interest in compilers, DSLs, program synthesis, or AI for systems

Preferred Qualifications

• Real depth in kernels and accelerators
• Experience optimizing code for GPUs, high-performance CPUs, or custom accelerators
• Ability to reason deeply about performance, abstractions, and system design