Training Performance Engineer

About this role

About the Team Training Runtime designs the core distributed machine-learning training runtime that powers everything from early research experiments to frontier-scale model runs. With a dual mandate to accelerate researchers and enable frontier scale, we’re building a unified, modular runtime that meets researchers where they are and moves with them up the scaling curve.

Our work focuses on three pillars: high-performance, asynchronous, zero-copy tensor and optimizer-state-aware data movement; performant, high-uptime, fault-tolerant training frameworks (training loop, state management, resilient checkpointing, deterministic orchestration, and observability); and distributed process management for long-lived, job-specific and user-provided processes.

We integrate proven large-scale capabilities into a composable, developer-facing runtime so teams can iterate quickly and run reliably at any scale, partnering closely with model-stack, research, and platform teams. Success for us is measured by raising both training throughput (how fast models train) and researcher throughput (how fast ideas become experiments and products).

About the Role As a Training Performance Engineer, you’ll drive efficiency improvements across our distributed training stack. You’ll analyze large-scale training runs, identify utilization gaps, and design optimizations that push the boundaries of throughput and uptime. This role blends deep systems understanding with practical performance engineering — analyzing GPU kernel performance, collective communication throughput, investigating I/O bottlenecks, and sharding our models so we can train them at massive scale.

You’ll help ensure that our clusters are running at peak performance, enabling OpenAI to train larger, more capable models with the same compute budget.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.