Software Engineer, Kernel Performance & AI Tooling

The role

This person will advance kernel development, performance engineering, and hardware-software co-design capabilities. They will work on developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure with a focus on AI-assisted workflows.

What you will do

• Build developer tooling and workflows for kernel development and performance optimization.
• Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure for AI-assisted optimization systems.
• Optimize production kernels by formulating optimization problems, running search loops, and analyzing bottlenecks.
• Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems for kernel optimization and hardware-software co-design.
• Improve AI-assisted optimization systems through datasets, evaluations, benchmarking, and research infrastructure.
• Partner across research and engineering teams to turn ideas into practical systems.

Required qualifications

• Strong systems or tooling engineering experience in low-level software, performance optimization, or infrastructure.
• Experience with developer tooling, debugging infrastructure, profiling, observability, or workflow design.
• 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.
• Strong experimental judgment and comfort with ambiguity.
• Ability to move between research exploration and production execution.
• Interest in compilers, DSLs, program synthesis, or AI for systems.

Nice to have

• Strong systems and tooling engineer with real depth in kernels and accelerators.
• Comfortable working across software and hardware boundaries.
• Ability to reason deeply about performance, abstractions, and system design.
• Hands-on experience optimizing code for GPUs, high-performance CPUs, or custom accelerators.

Before you apply

• Candidates may need to meet certain legal status requirements to comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations.
• Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for advanced AI workloads.