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Performance Engineer
Company | OpenAI |
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Location | San Francisco, CA, USA |
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Salary | $325000 – $405000 |
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Type | Full-Time |
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Degrees | |
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Experience Level | Senior, Expert or higher |
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Requirements
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong track record in performance or reliability of high-scale distributed systems
- Deeply comfortable with performance profiling tools and tracing systems
- Experience optimizing performance across one or more layers of the stack (e.g., database, networking, storage, application runtime, GC tuning, Python/Golang internals, GPU utilization)
- Strong understanding of OS internals, scheduling, memory management, and IO patterns
- Contributed to observability, benchmarking, or performance-focused infrastructure at scale
- Demonstrated success navigating ambiguity and aligning stakeholders around performance goals
- Value simplicity, rigor, and collaboration when solving complex systems problems.
Responsibilities
- Analyze and optimize performance across application, middleware, runtime, and infrastructure layers—networking, storage, Python runtime, GPU utilization, and beyond
- Develop tooling and metrics that provide deep observability into system performance
- Collaborate closely with infra, platform, training, and product teams to identify key performance goals and drive systemic improvements
- Influence architecture and design decisions to prioritize latency, throughput, and efficiency at scale
- Lead investigations into high-impact performance regressions or scalability issues in production
- Drive performance testing strategies and help define SLAs/SLOs around latency and throughput for critical systems.
Preferred Qualifications
No preferred qualifications provided.