Performance & Systems Engineer, Codex
At a glance
Highlights
- high-ownership role
- state-of-the-art AI systems
- impact millions of users
- collaborate with researchers
- hybrid work model
Heads up
- 3 days office per week
Why this role might suit you
The position provides exposure to state-of-the-art AI research, high-impact system optimization, and collaboration with leading engineers, all within a hybrid San Francisco environment.
Skills
About the role
About the Team
The Codex team is responsible for building state-of-the-art AI systems that can write code, reason about software, and act as intelligent agents for developers and non-developers alike. Our mission is to push the frontier of code generation and agentic reasoning, and deploy these capabilities in real-world products such as ChatGPT and the API, as well as in next-generation tools specifically designed for agentic coding. We operate across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure—owning the full lifecycle of experimentation, deployment, and iteration on novel coding capabilities.
About the Role
As a Performance & Systems Engineer on the Codex team, you will be responsible for whole-system optimization across a complex, evolving stack. Codex spans LLM inference, cloud orchestration, agentic work management, and multiple product surfaces. Your job will be to identify and land high-leverage changes—across infrastructure, modeling, and product layers—that make Codex agents significantly faster and cheaper to serve.
We’re looking for generalists who thrive in ambiguity and love chasing performance bottlenecks to ground. This is a high-ownership role where your work will directly improve the experience of millions of users.
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:
- Hunt down and address inefficiencies across the Codex system stack, from agent behavior to LLM inference to container orchestration, and beyond.
- Build tooling to measure, profile, and optimize system performance at scale.
- Collaborate with researchers and engineers to land high-ROI changes that improve latency and cost.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have experience operating across both ML systems and cloud infrastructure.
- Enjoy diving into messy, ambiguous problems and emerging with clear wins.
- Think holistically about performance, balancing speed, cost, and user experience.
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.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Compensation
This Systems Engineer role pays $295k-$445k/yr. Within typical range for systems engineer roles in United States.
Questions about this role
Want AI Applyd to auto-apply to roles like this?
We tailor your resume per posting, fill the forms, and track replies for you.