Performance Modeling Lead

The role

You will build and lead a small team to develop modeling frameworks and methodologies for AI infrastructure systems. This role involves evaluating system-level tradeoffs to guide architectural decisions and long-term infrastructure strategy.

What you will do

• Build and own a performance modeling framework/toolchain to evaluate AI systems.
• Analyze and quantify architectural tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, storage, and system topology.
• Develop performance models to guide decisions on scale-up vs. scale-out architectures, interconnect and network design, and memory hierarchy.
• Translate modeling outputs into clear recommendations for internal teams and external hardware vendors.
• Influence reference designs and vendor roadmaps through data-driven insights.
• Partner with machine learning, systems, and hardware teams to understand workload characteristics.
• Lead and grow a small team of 2–3 engineers.
• Improve modeling fidelity by validating against real system behavior and measurements.

Required qualifications

• Experience owning or building performance modeling frameworks used to drive real system design decisions.
• Deep knowledge of AI/ML workloads, including training and/or inference at scale.
• Understand system-level tradeoffs across compute, memory, and networking in large-scale distributed systems.
• Comfortable working across abstraction layers from workload behavior to hardware implementation.
• Experience using modeling (analytical or simulation) to inform architectural decisions.
• Ability to operate in ambiguous problem spaces and turn open-ended questions into structured analysis.
• Ability to communicate clearly and influence internal teams and external partners.

Nice to have

• Experience working with hardware vendors (ODM/JDM, silicon, networking).
• Background in data center infrastructure or hyperscale systems.
• Familiarity with accelerators (GPUs/ASICs) and interconnects (e.g., NVLink, InfiniBand, Ethernet).
• Experience influencing hardware roadmaps or reference architectures.
• Prior experience leading or mentoring engineers.

Benefits

• Relocation assistance

Before you apply

• Background checks for applicants 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 system and infrastructure solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads.