Systems R&D Engineer, Industrial Compute

About the Team

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.

As part of the Stargate initiative, the Industrial Compute team's mission is to build and operate the foundation that powers our research and products. To deliver on this mission, there is a critical need for advanced lab infrastructure and capabilities to perform rapid prototyping, targeted and end-to-end testing, and system qualification across the full software and hardware stack to ensure readiness and stability for fast and smooth deployment of our large-scale clusters.

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced engineer to lead advanced R&D, rapid prototyping, and build-out of in-house lab infrastructure to support system bring-up, testing, and qualification for next-generation systems.

In this role, you will:

You will work closely with the research, fleet, silicon, hardware health, and external vendors and partners to accelerate system qualification, increase deployment velocity, and improve platform and fleet robustness at scale. You will focus on detailed evaluation and systematic testing of early hardware, including servers, racks, NICs, switches, chips, optics, transceivers, and other lab prototype equipment.

Your engineering work will span a broad range of software (systems, firmware, RDMA, collectives, cluster provisioning, orchestration, etc.) and/or hardware solutions (e.g., FPGA development) to manage lab infrastructure, support bring-up activities and perform extensive characterizations of new hardware through microbenchmarking, fault injection, impairment modeling, localized stress testing, and end-to-end evaluations.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA or Seattle, WA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related field

• Strong background in system architecture, large-scale distributed systems and AI/HPC networking expertise (high performance multipath transport protocols, RDMA, RoCE, Infiniband)

• 5+ years of software development experience in C/C++ and Python

• Experience developing and running large-scale distributed AI workloads

• Hands-on lab experience with datacenter hardware (racks, servers, switches, NICs, accelerators, etc.)

• Experience with low-level software and/or FPGA hardware development (e.g., firmware or RTL)

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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