OpenAI
Software Engineer, Kernel Performance & AI Tooling
$266K–$445K
San Francisco · Hybrid · Full-time · Posted Apr 17, 2026
- Visa sponsorship
- Candidates may need to meet certain legal status requirements under U.S. export control laws and regulations.
About the job
Build and improve kernel optimization, performance engineering, and AI-assisted tooling and infrastructure for production kernels and hardware-software co-design.
What you'll do
- Build developer tools and workflows for kernel development, optimization, debugging, integration, and deployment.
- Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure for AI-assisted optimization systems.
- Optimize production kernels and improve AI-assisted optimization through search, benchmarking, evaluations, and research infrastructure.
What they ask for
- 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 technical-user workflows.
- Depth in kernel development, accelerator architecture, compiler systems, or a related performance-critical domain.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted systems, agentic workflows, post-training, or reinforcement learning for engineering or research applications.
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience optimizing code for GPUs, high-performance CPUs, or custom accelerators.
- Interest in compilers, DSLs, program synthesis, or AI for systems.
Pay
USD 266K – 445K base salary
Tools
GPUs, high-performance CPUs, custom accelerators, compilers, DSLs
AI focus
Develop and improve AI-assisted kernel optimization workflows, tooling, evaluations, datasets, benchmarking, and research infrastructure.
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