OpenAI

Software Engineer, Workload Enablement

OpenAI$130K — $180K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • BS in CS/EE or equivalent practical experience
  • 5+ years in ML systems, performance engineering, distributed systems, or HPC
  • Hands-on experience with PyTorch and modern LLM training/inference
  • Familiarity with large-scale distributed training concepts
  • Proficiency in Python; experience with C++/CUDA/HIP is a plus
  • Strong profiling/debugging skills using tools like Nsight and perf

Responsibilities

  • Port and validate inference and training workloads on new platforms
  • Build benchmarks and stress tests to capture end-to-end workload behavior
  • Analyze performance metrics for distributed training/inference
  • Create repeatable test harnesses for CI/lab environments
  • Collaborate with systems engineers to enhance platform stability and scalability
  • Produce clear bug reports and communicate with vendors and stakeholders

Benefits

  • Opportunities for professional development
  • Work in a dynamic, innovative environment
  • Collaborative team culture
  • Access to cutting-edge technologies
  • Flexible working arrangements
Full Job Description
About the Role

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).

Key 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.
  • Build a suite of benchmarks and stress tests that capture real E2E behavior of our workloads by exercising all aspects of a system, including CPU, GPU, memory subsystem, frontend, scale-up, and scale-out networking (including WAN traffic, NVlink and RDMA collectives), storage, thermals, and any other relevant parts.
  • 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.

Qualifications
  • 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

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

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