You'll shape the future of fal's inference engine and ensure our generative models achieve best-in-class performance. Your work directly impacts our ability to rapidly deliver cutting-edge creative solutions to users, from individual creators to global brands.

Day-to-day, you'll set technical direction, guide your team to build high-performance inference solutions, and personally contribute to critical inference performance enhancements and optimizations. You'll collaborate closely with research & applied ML teams, influence model inference strategies and deployment techniques, and drive advanced performance optimizations.

As a leader, you'll mentor and scale your team, coach and expand your team of performance-focused engineers, and help them innovate, solve complex performance challenges, and level up their skills.

To succeed in this role, you'll need to be deeply experienced in ML performance optimization, understand the full ML performance stack, and know inference inside-out. You'll also need to thrive in cross-functional collaboration and have excellent leadership skills.

If you're ready to lead the future of inference performance at a fast-paced, high-growth frontier, apply now!

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Software Engineer, Hardware

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Scaling

Compensation

• $266K – $455K • Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts

• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)

• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match

• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)

• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees

• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)

• Mental health and wellness support

• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage

• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth

• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible

• Relocation support for eligible employees

• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system-level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team is responsible for building the next generation of AI-native silicon while working closely with software and research partners to co-design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering production-grade silicon for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team also creates custom design tools and methodologies that accelerate innovation and enable hardware optimized specifically for AI.

About the Role

As a software engineer on the Scaling team, you’ll help build and optimize the low-level stack that orchestrates computation and data movement across OpenAI’s supercomputing clusters. Your work will involve designing high-performance runtimes, building custom kernels, contributing to compiler infrastructure, and developing scalable simulation systems to validate and optimize distributed training workloads.

You will work at the intersection of systems programming, ML infrastructure, and high-performance computing, helping to create both ergonomic developer APIs and highly efficient runtime systems. This means balancing ease of use and introspection with the need for stability and performance on our evolving hardware fleet.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model (3 days/week in-office). Relocation assistance is available.

In this role, you will:

• Design and build APIs and runtime components to orchestrate computation and data movement across heterogeneous ML workloads.

• Contribute to compiler infrastructure, including the development of optimizations and compiler passes to support evolving hardware.

• Engineer and optimize compute and data kernels, ensuring correctness, high performance, and portability across simulation and production environments.

• Profile and optimize system bottlenecks, especially around I/O, memory hierarchy, and interconnects, at both local and distributed scales.

• Develop simulation infrastructure to validate runtime behaviors, test training stack changes, and support early-stage hardware and system development.

• Rapidly deploy runtime and compiler updates to new supercomputing builds in close collaboration with hardware and research teams.

• Work across a diverse stack, primarily using Rust and Python, with opportunities to influence architecture decisions across the training framework.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a deep curiosity for how large-scale systems work and enjoy making them faster, simpler, and more reliable.

• Are proficient in systems programming (e.g., Rust, C++) and scripting languages like Python.

• Have experience in one or more of the following areas: compiler development, kernel authoring, accelerator programming, runtime systems, distributed systems, or high-performance simulation.

• Are excited to work in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment with evolving hardware and ML system demands.

• Value engineering excellence, technical leadership, and thoughtful system design.

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.

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