Software Engineer, Kernel Performance & AI Tooling

About this role

OpenAI's Hardware organization seeks a systems engineer to advance kernel development and performance optimization using AI-assisted workflows and tooling. You'll work at the intersection of kernel optimization, developer tools, and hardware-software co-design, helping define the future of kernel engineering with AI as a productivity multiplier.

What you'll do

• Build developer tooling and workflows that accelerate kernel development and performance optimization
• Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure for AI-assisted optimization systems
• Optimize production kernels end-to-end through formulation, search, analysis, and debugging
• Design abstractions and automation systems for kernel optimization and hardware-software co-design
• Improve AI-assisted optimization through better datasets, evaluations, and benchmarking
• Partner across research and engineering teams to translate ideas into practical production systems

What they're looking for

• Low-level software and performance optimization
• Kernel development or accelerator architecture
• Developer tooling, debugging, profiling, and observability
• AI-assisted systems and agentic workflows
• GPU or high-performance CPU optimization
• Compilers, DSLs, or program synthesis
• Systems design and abstraction
• Experimental judgment and ambiguity tolerance