Software Engineer

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Scaling

Compensation

$230K – $385K

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts

Pre‑tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)

401(k) retirement plan with employer match

Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non‑birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)

Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non‑exempt employees

13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)

Mental health and wellness support

Employer‑paid basic life and disability coverage

Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth

Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible

Relocation support for eligible employees

Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at‑will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

About the Team

We’re hiring software engineers to make OpenAI’s Model Performance teams more productive. These teams work on the systems, tooling, and infrastructure that help improve model performance across OpenAI’s training and inference workloads at frontier scale.

About the Role

We’re looking for an autonomous, high‑ownership developer productivity engineer who cares deeply about helping other engineers move faster, safer, and with more confidence.

This role will sit within OpenAI’s Model Performance organization, contributing to developer infrastructure, CI systems, testing workflows, tooling, and broader performance infrastructure efforts. There is also a strong opportunity to contribute to the Triton project and help improve the systems that support performance‑critical engineering work across OpenAI.

In this role you will:

Improve development workflows for engineers working on model performance infrastructure

Design and improve CI/CD, release, validation, and testing pipelines

Build and maintain tools that improve reliability, iteration speed, and engineering confidence

Partner closely with engineers to identify friction in testing, debugging, deployment, and development workflows

Contribute to infrastructure efforts that support performance‑critical training and inference systems

Help improve developer experience across Python‑heavy codebases and performance‑oriented infrastructure

Work in a high‑context, ambiguous environment where ownership and good judgment matter

You might thrive in this role if:

You are motivated by enabling the people around you and helping engineers do their best work

You have strong experience with CI/CD, developer infrastructure, testing systems, tooling, or build/release workflows

You are highly collaborative, empathetic, and comfortable partnering deeply with technical teams

You are strong in Python and enjoy building reliable, scalable developer tools and infrastructure

You have experience improving large‑scale engineering workflows, especially around CI reliability, test infrastructure, and debugging velocity

You are self‑directed and comfortable operating with ambiguity

You do not need direct inference or model performance experience, but you are excited to learn the domain and make the team meaningfully more effective

Experience in the PyTorch ecosystem is highly relevant

Experience with C++ or Rust is a nice‑to‑have, but not required

When you see repeated friction — slow tests, flaky CI, brittle release processes, painful debugging, unclear validation — your instinct is to fix the underlying system

You are pragmatic and know how to balance high standards with forward progress

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.

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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.

Compensation Range: $230K - $385K

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