Software Engineer, Workload Enablement

About the role

The Scaling team is responsible for the architectural and engineering backbone of OpenAI's infrastructure. We design and deliver advanced systems that support the deployment and operation of cutting-edge AI models. Our work spans system software, networking, platform architecture, fleet-level monitoring, and performance optimization. We're hiring an SW Engineer to enable production workloads and end-to-end testing on new platforms. This role will include creating new test harnesses and platform stress benchmarks, porting existing inference and training workloads to new, sometimes early-access, systems/hardware, analyzing performance and bottlenecks, and characterizing the end-to-end behavior of new systems (compute, comms, storage, control plane, and failure modes).

Responsibilities

• Port and validate key inference and training workloads on new platforms/SKUs as they arrive; drive correctness, performance, and stability to an internal readiness bar.
• Deep-dive performance on distributed training/inference:
• Collective performance and tuning (across NCCL/RCCL and internal libraries)
• Overlap of compute/communication, kernel-level bottlenecks, memory bandwidth and scheduling effects
• Create repeatable test harnesses that run in CI / lab environments and produce actionable outputs (pass/fail, performance score, regression detection).
• Partner with systems + fleet bring-up engineers to ensure the platform is not only stable and performant, but also operationally usable and scalable (containerization, K8s integration, telemetry hooks, failure triage loops).
• Work cross-functionally with vendors and internal stakeholders by producing clear bug reports, minimal repros, and prioritized issue lists.

Requirements

• BS in CS/EE (or equivalent practical experience).
• 5+ years in one or more of: ML systems, performance engineering, distributed systems, or HPC.
• Strong hands-on experience with:
• PyTorch and modern LLM training/inference stacks
• Large-scale distributed training concepts (data/model/pipeline parallel, collective comms)
• Experience with RDMA and debugging/optimizing comms libraries (NCCL or RCCL) and their interaction with hardware/network
• Proficiency in Python plus comfort reading/writing performance-critical code (C++/CUDA/HIP is a plus).
• Strong profiling/debugging skills (e.g., Nsight, rocprof, perf, flamegraphs; ability to reason from traces/counters).
• Preferred Skills
• Experience building workload-shaped benchmarks and stress/fault tests that correlate to production behavior (not just synthetic loops or microbenchmarks).
• Familiarity with RDMA networking and transport tuning; understanding of how network topology and congestion impact collectives.
• Experience running and validating workloads in Kubernetes, and bridging "research code" into robust, repeatable infrastructure.
• Hands-on lab experience with early hardware (new NICs, new GPUs/accelerators, early racks).
• About OpenAI
• 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 .

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