Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Technical Lead role sits at a point where AI-native SaaS products are constrained less by model capability and more by serving economics and reliability. The listing signals a hybrid research and product environment focused on multimodal foundation models, where inference efficiency is a core lever for making advanced capabilities usable at scale rather than a back-office optimisation.
For a SaaS career, the work maps to durable platform problems that recur across AI product companies: throughput, latency, capacity planning, and the translation of research outputs into production-grade systems. Ownership of kernel-level tuning, data movement, and serving infrastructure builds a profile that stays relevant as teams shift between model iteration and product hardening. The close partnership with research and product also reflects a common SaaS pattern in AI, where engineering acts as the connective tissue between novel capabilities and dependable user experiences.
This is best suited to a senior engineer who prefers deep technical direction, ambiguous problem spaces, and end-to-end accountability for performance outcomes. It will appeal to professionals who enjoy making measurable system improvements and who want their work to shape how a flagship AI product is delivered, not just how it is built.
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
The Sora team is pioneering multimodal capabilities for OpenAI’s foundation models. We’re a hybrid research and product team focused on integrating multimodal functionalities into our AI products, ensuring they are reliable, user-friendly, and aligned with our mission of broad societal benefit.
About the Role
We’re looking for a GPU Inference Engineer to contribute to improvements in model serving efficiency for Sora. This is a high-impact role where you’ll drive initiatives to optimize inference performance and scalability. You’ll also be engaged in model design, to help assist our researchers in developing inference-friendly models.
This role is critical to scaling the team’s broader goals - it will directly enable leadership to focus on higher-leverage initiatives by building a stronger technical foundation.
In this role you will:
Perform engineering efforts focused on improving model serving, inference performance, and system efficiency
Drive optimizations from a kernel and data movement perspective to improve system throughput and reliability
Partner closely with research and product teams to ensure our models perform effectively at scale
Design, build, and improve critical serving infrastructure to support Sora’s growth and reliability needs
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have deep expertise in model performance optimization, particularly at the inference layer
Have a strong background in kernel-level systems, data movement, and low-level performance tuning
Are excited about scaling high-performing AI systems that serve real-world, multimodal workloads
Can navigate ambiguity, set technical direction, and drive complex initiatives to completion
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
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.
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