Software Engineer, Triton Compiler

About the Team

Our mission at OpenAI is to discover and enact the path to safe, beneficial AGI. To do this, we believe that many technical breakthroughs are needed in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, large scale optimization, active learning, among other topics.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer, you will help build AI systems that achieve levels of performance that were previously impossible. This means strong engineering fundamentals—designing and optimizing core ML systems, writing highly reliable low-level code, and advancing the algorithms and infrastructure that power our models. The end goal in every project is the same: push the frontier forward.

The Compiler/Kernels team is responsible for the performance-critical software stack that brings OpenAI’s custom silicon to life. We design and build the compilers, languages, and high-performance kernels that allow researchers to fully exploit our first-party accelerators. This includes advancing Triton and its backend, developing new compiler passes, and creating the tooling needed to write fast, correct, and deeply optimized kernels for brand-new hardware.

We partner closely with the hardware team to unlock new capabilities and ensure our custom silicon can support the next generation of frontier models.

If you love compilers, kernels, and shaping how entirely new AI hardware is programmed, this role is for you. We’re looking for engineers who are self-directed, comfortable in ambiguous technical spaces, and excited to identify and solve the highest-leverage problems.

We’re looking for a track record of:

• 3+ years of relevant engineering experience, ideally in systems, compilers, ML frameworks, or performance engineering

• Owning problems end-to-end, including learning new hardware and software domains as needed

• Bonus: contributions to ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow) or compilers (e.g., LLVM, MLIR, XLA), or experience programming custom or specialized accelerators

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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