Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

About the Team

The Compute Runtime team builds the low level framework components to power our ML training systems. We work on building robust, scalable, high performance components to support our distributed training workloads. Our priorities are to maximize the productivity of our researchers and our hardware, with the goal of accelerating progress towards AGI.

About the Role

As a Distributed Systems engineer, you will work to deliver powerful APIs orchestrating thousands of computers moving and persisting vast amounts of data. This requires both providing easy to use, introspectable systems that can promote a fast debugging and development cycle, while also enabling that experience to scale to our newest supercomputers maintaining stability and performance throughout.

We’re looking for people who love optimizing an end to end system, understanding high performance I/O to maximize local performance and distributed across our supercomputers. We want someone excited by the rapid pace of responding to the dynamic and evolving needs of our training systems architectures.

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.

In this role, you will:

• Work across our Python and Rust stack

• Profile and optimize and help design for scale our compute and data capabilities

• Work on deploying our training framework to our latest supercomputers rapidly responding to the changing shapes and needs of the ML systems.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have worked on large distributed systems

• Love figuring out how systems work and continuously come up with ideas for how to make them faster while minimizing complexity and maintenance burden

• Have strong software engineering skills and are proficient in Python and Rust or equivalent.

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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