OpenAI

Software Engineer, Kernel Performance & AI Tooling

OpenAI$130K — $180K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of systems or tooling engineering experience
  • Background in low-level software and performance optimization
  • Experience with developer tooling, profiling, and observability
  • Depth in kernel development, accelerator architecture, or compilers
  • Familiarity with AI-assisted systems and workflows
  • Strong experimental judgment and comfort with ambiguity
  • Interest in program synthesis and AI applications for systems

Responsibilities

  • Build tools and workflows for faster kernel development and optimization
  • Develop infrastructure for AI-assisted optimization systems
  • Optimize production kernels by analyzing bottlenecks and debugging
  • Design automation systems for kernel optimization and validation
  • Improve AI-assisted systems through better datasets and evaluations
  • Collaborate with research and engineering teams on practical system development

Benefits

  • Opportunities for professional growth and development
  • Collaborative work environment with cross-functional teams
  • Focus on cutting-edge technologies in AI and systems engineering
  • Engagement in projects that shape the future of kernel engineering
  • Access to advanced research infrastructure
Full Job Description
About the Role

We are looking for a systems-minded engineer to help advance our kernel development, performance engineering, and hardware-software co-design capabilities, with a particular focus on AI-assisted workflows and tooling. This person will work at the intersection of kernel optimization, developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure, helping us improve both how production kernels are built and optimized, and how future hardware-software systems are designed and evaluated. The role is ideal for someone who is excited by low-level performance work, but also sees AI and automation as powerful tools for accelerating engineering velocity. You will help define the future of kernel engineering in the era of AI-assisted development.

In this role, you may:
  • Build developer tooling and workflows that make kernel development and performance optimization faster, more scalable, and easier to debug, integrate, and deploy.
  • Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure that makes AI-assisted optimization systems more interpretable, reliable, and effective.
  • Optimize production kernels end to end by formulating optimization problems, running search loops, analyzing bottlenecks, debugging generated implementations, and landing improvements into production.
  • Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems that accelerate kernel optimization, correctness validation, and hardware-software co-design.
  • Improve AI-assisted optimization systems for specialized tasks through better datasets, evaluations, benchmarking, and research infrastructure.
  • Partner across research and engineering teams to turn new ideas into practical systems spanning production needs and long-term infrastructure strategy.


You might thrive in this role if you have:
  • Strong systems or tooling engineering experience, with a background in low-level software, performance optimization, or infrastructure.
  • Experience with developer tooling, debugging infrastructure, profiling, observability, or workflow design for technical users.
  • Depth in kernel development, accelerator architecture, compiler systems, or related performance-critical domains.
  • Familiarity with AI-assisted systems, agentic workflows, post-training, or reinforcement learning for engineering or research applications.
  • Strong experimental judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to move fluidly between research exploration and production execution.
  • Interest in compilers, DSLs, program synthesis, or AI for systems.


Preferred profile

The ideal candidate is a strong systems and tooling engineer with real depth in kernels and accelerators. They are comfortable working across software and hardware boundaries, can reason deeply about performance, abstractions, and system design, and have hands-on experience optimizing code for GPUs, high-performance CPUs, or custom accelerators. They view AI not as the end product, but as a force multiplier for engineering productivity and system optimization.

To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at OpenAI

More Information Technology Jobs

Find similar Software Engineer, Kernel Performance & AI Tooling jobs: