Training Performance Engineer at OpenAI

San Francisco, California, United States

OpenAI Logo
$250,000 – $460,000Compensation
Senior (5 to 8 years), Expert & Leadership (9+ years)Experience Level
Full TimeJob Type
UnknownVisa
Artificial Intelligence, Machine LearningIndustries

Requirements

  • Love optimizing performance and digging into systems to understand how every layer interacts
  • Strong programming skills in Python and C++ (Rust or CUDA a plus)
  • Experience running distributed training jobs on multi-GPU systems or HPC clusters
  • Enjoy debugging complex distributed systems and measuring efficiency rigorously
  • Exposure to frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow and understanding of how large-scale training loops are built
  • Comfortable collaborating across teams and translating raw profiling data into practical engineering improvements
  • Nice to have:
  • Familiarity with NCCL, MPI, or UCX communication libraries
  • Experience with large-scale data loading and checkpointing systems
  • Prior work on training runtime, distributed scheduling, or ML compiler optimization

Responsibilities

  • Profile end-to-end training runs to identify performance bottlenecks across compute, communication, and storage
  • Optimize GPU utilization and throughput for large-scale distributed model training
  • Collaborate with runtime and systems engineers to improve kernel efficiency, scheduling, and collective communication performance
  • Implement model graph transforms to improve end-to-end throughput
  • Build tooling to monitor and visualize MFU, throughput, and uptime across clusters
  • Partner with researchers to ensure new model architectures scale efficiently during pre-training
  • Contribute to infrastructure decisions that improve reliability and efficiency of large training jobs

Skills

Distributed Training
GPU Kernels
Performance Optimization
Collective Communications
I/O Optimization
Model Sharding
Fault Tolerance
Checkpointing
Orchestration
Observability
Tensor Data Movement

OpenAI

Develops safe and beneficial AI technologies

About OpenAI

OpenAI develops and deploys artificial intelligence technologies aimed at benefiting humanity. The company creates advanced AI models capable of performing various tasks, such as automating processes and enhancing creativity. OpenAI's products, like Sora, allow users to generate videos from text descriptions, showcasing the versatility of its AI applications. Unlike many competitors, OpenAI operates under a capped profit model, which limits the profits it can make and ensures that excess earnings are redistributed to maximize the social benefits of AI. This commitment to safety and ethical considerations is central to its mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) serves all of humanity.

San Francisco, CaliforniaHeadquarters
2015Year Founded
$18,433.2MTotal Funding
LATE_VCCompany Stage
AI & Machine LearningIndustries
1,001-5,000Employees

Benefits

Health insurance
Dental and vision insurance
Flexible spending account for healthcare and dependent care
Mental healthcare service
Fertility treatment coverage
401(k) with generous matching
20-week paid parental leave
Life insurance (complimentary)
AD&D insurance (complimentary)
Short-term/long-term disability insurance (complimentary)
Optional buy-up life insurance
Flexible work hours and unlimited paid time off (we encourage 4+ weeks per year)
Annual learning & development stipend
Regular team happy hours and outings
Daily catered lunch and dinner
Travel to domestic conferences

Risks

Elon Musk's legal battle may pose financial and reputational challenges for OpenAI.
Customizable ChatGPT personas could lead to privacy and ethical concerns.
Competitors like Anthropic raising capital may intensify market competition.

Differentiation

OpenAI's capped profit model prioritizes ethical AI development over unlimited profit.
OpenAI's AI models, like Sora, offer unique video creation from text descriptions.
OpenAI's focus on AGI aims to create AI systems smarter than humans.

Upsides

OpenAI's $6.6 billion funding boosts its AI research and computational capacity.
Customizable ChatGPT personas enhance user engagement and satisfaction.
OpenAI's 'Operator' AI agent could revolutionize workforce automation by 2025.

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