OpenAI· Runtime· San Francisco
Software Engineer, Productivity - Inference Runtime
Comp$230K – $385K
Classified Tasks (17)
Automate 0%Augment 88%Human-Only 12%
Augment (15)
AI assists, human decides
Scale engineering systems, safeguards, and developer workflows to enable teams to move quickly without compromising reliability or performance
technical
Develop tooling and operational foundations to support model launches, inference optimizations, cloud provider integrations, and large-scale deployments across the inference stack
technical
Improve tooling and infrastructure for deploy gate validation of inference engine images to ensure correctness, numerical soundness, and regression-free releases
technical
Bring rigor to release, validation, branching, and deployment processes across the inference stack
operational
Improve canary, asynchronous, and large-scale validation workflows for inference systems
operational
Harden CI, testing, and validation infrastructure so failures are actionable and trustworthy
technical
Reduce noisy or flaky test failures caused by infrastructure instability, GPU scheduling, or test environment issues
technical
Build automation for failure triage, ownership detection, debugging, and escalation when failures occur
technical
Improve observability and monitoring for inference systems and release processes
technical
Improve rollout safety and automate release workflows
operational
Build developer self-service tooling to reduce friction in testing, debugging, and releases
technical
Harden systems that catch issues before they reach production
technical
Support new model launches and safely ship inference optimizations to production
operational
Onboard new infrastructure providers by implementing integrations and provider-specific deployment support
technical
Operate and scale performance-sensitive inference platforms to maintain reliability and efficiency
operational
Human-Only (2)
Requires human judgment
Partner closely with inference teams, research developer productivity, engine acceleration, and infrastructure teams to improve release quality and rollout safety
communication
Triage and debug failures in deploy gates, inference engines, and validation pipelines during incidents
operational
Job description
Software Engineer, Productivity - Inference Runtime | OpenAI Careers ## Software Engineer, Productivity - Inference Runtime Runtime - San Francisco Apply now(opens in a new window) ## **About the Team** We’re hiring a Developer Productivity engineer to support OpenAI’s Inference Runtime teams. These teams own the systems responsible for serving models reliably, efficiently, and safely across Codex, ChatGPT, API, and internal research workloads. We’re hiring a Developer Productivity Engineer to help scale the engineering systems, safeguards, and developer workflows that enable our teams to move quickly without compromising reliability or performance. This role sits at the intersection of developer experience, CI/CD infrastructure, release engineering, production readiness, and inference systems reliability. You’ll work on the tooling and operational foundations that support model launches, inference optimizations, cloud provider integrations, and large-scale deployments across a rapidly evolving inference stack. ## **About the Role** We’re looking for an autonomous, high-ownership engineer who cares deeply about making other engineers faster, safer, and more confident. A major focus of this role will be improving the tooling and infrastructure around deploy gates for inference engine images. These systems help ensure that every image released to production and research is correct, numerically sound, free of regressions, and performant across key metrics like time-to-first-token (TTFT) and time-between-tokens (TBT). You’ll help harden the systems that catch issues before they reach production, reduce noise from flaky or infrastructure-related test failures, and improve automation around triage, ownership, debugging, and escalation when failures occur. You’ll also work on improving observability, rollout safety, release automation, and developer self-service tooling across a rapidly evolving inference stack. This is not generic internal tools work. The systems you build directly impact OpenAI’s ability to support new model launches, safely ship inference optimizations to the world, onboard new infrastructure providers, and operate one of the largest and most performance-sensitive inference platforms in the world. In this role, you will: * Improve systems that ensure inference engine releases are correct, performant, and regression-free by evolving tooling and infrastructure for deploy gate validation * Bring rigor to release, validation, branching, and deployment processes across the inference stack * Improve canary, async, and large-scale validation workflows for inference systems * Harden CI, testing, and validation infrastructure so failures are actionable and trustworthy * Reduce noisy or flaky failures caused by infrastructure instability, GPU scheduling, or test environment issues * Build automation for failure triage, ownership detection, debugging, and escalation * Partner closely with inference teams, research developer productivity, engine acceleration, and infrastructure teams to improve release quality and rollout safety * Reduce developer friction in testing, debugging, and release workflows so engineers can move faster with confidence ## **You might thrive in this role if:** * You have strong experience with CI/CD systems, testing infrastructure, release tooling, developer productivity, or large-scale build and validation systems * You are excited by high-impact infrastructure where small regressions in correctness, latency, or reliability meaningfully affect production systems * You care about building systems engineers can trust, not just systems that technically function * You have strong developer empathy and enjoy improving workflows, reducing friction, and making engineers more effective * You demonstrate high ownership and proactively identify problems, drive improvements, and follow issues through resolution * You are comfortable working in Python-h