Performance Modeling Lead

OpenAI, Inc.

Job Overview

Location

San Francisco

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• The Performance Modeling Lead will build and lead a small, high-impact team responsible for answering forward-looking architectural questions across AI infrastructure systems, directly influencing reference architectures, vendor designs, and long-term infrastructure strategy.
• Day to day, the role involves building and owning a performance modeling framework/toolchain, analyzing architectural tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, storage, and system topology, developing performance models to guide decisions on scale-up vs. scale-out architectures, interconnect and network design, memory hierarchy, and system balance, translating modeling outputs into clear recommendations for internal teams and external hardware vendors, influencing reference designs and vendor roadmaps through data-driven insights, partnering with machine learning, systems, and hardware teams to understand workload characteristics, leading and growing a team of 2–3 engineers, and continuously improving modeling fidelity by validating against real system behavior.
• The role sits within OpenAI’s Hardware organization, which develops system and infrastructure solutions for advanced AI workloads, working closely with research, software, and external hardware partners to shape the next generation of AI systems from silicon through full-scale deployments, with a focus on understanding and optimizing performance across the full system stack using rigorous, quantitative analysis of real-world workloads.
• The person in this role will develop deep expertise in AI workload modeling, system architecture tradeoffs, and hardware-software co-design, gain leadership experience guiding a technical team, influence high-stakes infrastructure decisions at a leading AI company, and strengthen their ability to translate complex quantitative analysis into actionable guidance for both technical and cross-functional stakeholders.

🎯 Requirements

• Experience owning or building performance modeling frameworks used to drive real system design decisions
• Deep knowledge of AI/ML workloads, including training and/or inference at scale
• Understanding of system-level tradeoffs across compute, memory, and networking in large-scale distributed systems
• Experience using modeling (analytical or simulation) to inform architectural decisions
• Ability to operate in ambiguous problem spaces and turn open-ended questions into structured analysis
• Clear communication skills to influence both internal teams and external partners

🏖️ Benefits

• Hybrid work model (3 days in the office per week)
• Relocation assistance
• Opportunity to lead and grow a small, high-impact team
• Direct influence on reference architectures and vendor roadmaps for AI infrastructure
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI workloads and next-generation hardware systems
• Commitment to safety, inclusivity, and equitable AI development at OpenAI

Skills & Technologies

Senior

Hybrid

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OpenAI, Inc.

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About OpenAI, Inc.

OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research and deployment company founded in 2015. It develops large-scale AI models such as GPT, DALL-E, and Codex, providing cloud APIs and consumer applications like ChatGPT. Originally established as a non-profit, it later created a capped-profit subsidiary to attract capital while maintaining its mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

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