Software Engineer, Frontier Systems

About the Team

The Frontier Systems team at OpenAI builds, launches, and supports the largest supercomputers in the world that OpenAI uses for its most cutting edge model training.

We take data center designs, turn them into real, working systems and build any software needed for running large-scale frontier model trainings.

Our mission is to bring up, stabilize and keep these hyperscale supercomputers reliable and efficient during the training of the frontier models.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer on the Frontier Systems team focused on power management, you will work on critical infrastructure to support cutting-edge research. With large-scale supercomputers consuming substantial amounts of power, managing this efficiently is key to maximizing computational capacity. This role is critical to ensuring that our cutting-edge research supercomputing infrastructure runs smoothly, while maintaining reliability and grid-level power stability.

Our team empowers strong engineers with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, as well as ability to effect change. This role will require a keen focus on system-level comprehensive investigations and the development of automated solutions. We want people who go deep on problems, investigate as thoroughly as possible, and build automation for detection and remediation at scale.

In this role, you will:

• Develop and implement system-level and software-level solutions to optimize power usage in large-scale supercomputers, ensuring efficient and reliable operations.

• Build automation to monitor power consumption patterns during training workloads and design algorithms to stabilize these fluctuations, preventing issues with grid reliability.

• Work with researchers and engineers to design tools for real-time monitoring, detection, and remediation of power-related hardware and system faults.

• Collaborate cross-functionally to translate complex electrical system requirements into code, while driving continuous improvements in power management solutions.

• Drive the development of power throttling mechanisms at the IT system level to dynamically adjust power usage based on workload demands and infrastructure limitations.

• Collaborate with hardware design teams to integrate system-level power control requirements into IT hardware design, ensuring seamless coordination between software-driven power management and hardware capabilities.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on solving large-scale, system-level challenges.

• Strong proficiency in Python and familiarity with automation and scripting tools (e.g., shell scripting).

• Experience with distributed systems to efficiently aggregate and analyze streaming data.

• Knowledge of electrical engineering concepts including digital signal processing, power systems, Fast Fourier Transforms, or related areas.

• Experience in system-level investigations and development of automated solutions to address power management, fault detection, and remediation.

• Strong analytical skills and the ability to dig into noisy data (experience with SQL, PromQL, Pandas, etc.).

• Comfort working with both hardware and software teams to solve multidisciplinary problems.

Bonus points if you have:

• Deep expertise with the power characteristics of synchronous workloads (as seen in supercomputing or model training environments).

• Knowledge of power control requirements in IT hardware design, with the ability to drive cross-functional collaboration to integrate power management features into hardware systems effectively.

• Working knowledge of control system fundamentals and how physical systems respond to control strategies.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

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.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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Compensation Range: $310K - $460K