Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Software Engineer role sits at the infrastructure layer that increasingly differentiates modern AI and developer-facing SaaS: the compiler and kernel stack that turns model research into usable, efficient product capability. Work on Triton and its backend signals an environment where performance, correctness, and hardware awareness matter, which is a common pressure point as SaaS companies operationalise large-scale AI workloads.
From a SaaS career perspective, the long-term value comes from building durable systems expertise that travels across high-compute product organisations. Experience improving compiler passes, tooling, and kernel implementations maps directly to recurring SaaS concerns like cost efficiency, latency, reliability, and throughput, especially where inference and training budgets shape product decisions. Close collaboration with hardware and research counterparts also builds fluency in cross-functional constraints that show up in AI productisation.
This role is best suited to engineers who prefer deep technical ownership and are comfortable operating in ambiguous problem spaces where the “right” abstraction is still evolving. It aligns with professionals who want to invest in low-level performance engineering and who are motivated by making new hardware and ML frameworks practical for production use.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
Our mission at OpenAI is to discover and enact the path to safe, beneficial AGI. To do this, we believe that many technical breakthroughs are needed in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, large scale optimization, active learning, among other topics.
About the Role
As a Software Engineer, you will help build AI systems that achieve levels of performance that were previously impossible. This means strong engineering fundamentals—designing and optimizing core ML systems, writing highly reliable low-level code, and advancing the algorithms and infrastructure that power our models. The end goal in every project is the same: push the frontier forward.
The Compiler/Kernels team is responsible for the performance-critical software stack that brings OpenAI’s custom silicon to life. We design and build the compilers, languages, and high-performance kernels that allow researchers to fully exploit our first-party accelerators. This includes advancing Triton and its backend, developing new compiler passes, and creating the tooling needed to write fast, correct, and deeply optimized kernels for brand-new hardware.
We partner closely with the hardware team to unlock new capabilities and ensure our custom silicon can support the next generation of frontier models.
If you love compilers, kernels, and shaping how entirely new AI hardware is programmed, this role is for you. We’re looking for engineers who are self-directed, comfortable in ambiguous technical spaces, and excited to identify and solve the highest-leverage problems.
We’re looking for a track record of:
3+ years of relevant engineering experience, ideally in systems, compilers, ML frameworks, or performance engineering
Owning problems end-to-end, including learning new hardware and software domains as needed
Bonus: contributions to ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow) or compilers (e.g., LLVM, MLIR, XLA), or experience programming custom or specialized accelerators
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.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
