Graphics Software Engineer - Consumer Devices

About the Team

The Graphics team builds the graphics runtimes and rendering systems that power next-generation user interfaces and visual experiences. We work across rendering pipelines, display composition, and GPU optimization to deliver beautiful, performant, and reliable real-time graphics across devices. Our work spans from early architecture through production, partnering closely with camera, vision, and UX teams to create seamless visual interactions.

About the Role

As a Graphics engineer, you will design, implement, and optimize real-time rendering pipelines and graphics frameworks for 2D and 3D applications. You'll own the end-to-end display and composition path-covering swapchains, frame pacing, vsync, color/HDR, and zero-copy buffer flow-while driving system reliability and performance at scale.

We're looking for engineers who combine deep technical expertise in rendering and GPU systems with a strong product sense for crafting responsive, high-quality user experiences.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Build and evolve graphics runtimes and libraries (text/raster, image pipelines, materials/shaders, scene graph) for app/UI developers.
• Design, implement, and optimize real-time rendering pipelines (2D/3D) using Vulkan or OpenGL ES.
• Own the display and composition path, including swapchains, frame pacing, vsync, color/HDR, and zero-copy buffer flow.
• Establish performance and quality bars through GPU/CPU profiling, frame-time analysis, and optimization for memory, power, and thermal budgets.
• Collaborate with camera, vision, and UX teams to enable compositing, effects, and media/compute interoperability.
• Drive reliability through robust startup/shutdown, crash capture, graceful GPU resets, and automated graphics tests in CI.

• Have deep experience shipping graphics or high-performance systems on Linux, Android, or iOS devices.
• Have built or contributed to UI/rendering frameworks.
• Are familiar with Vulkan, Metal, or OpenGL ES.
• Are proficient in C/C++ and modern shading languages.
• Understand display pipelines and windowing/compositors (e.g., DRM/KMS, Wayland, SurfaceFlinger/HWC, macOS/iOS render server, IOMobileFramebuffer).
• Have a proven track record shipping real-time rendering features with tight latency, power, and memory constraints.
• Are fluent with profiling and debugging tools (RenderDoc, Xcode Metal frame debugger, perf/ftrace/Instruments, GDB/LLDB).
• Enjoy working closely with designers to balance visual ambition and engineering constraints.
• (Nice to have) Experience with text and 2D stacks (Skia, FreeType/HarfBuzz, CoreGraphics) or vector/raster pipelines.
• (Nice to have) Familiarity with color management and HDR (ICC color profiles, wide-gamut workflows).
• (Nice to have) Experience with compute/graphics interop (Vulkan compute, CUDA/OpenCL/Metal) and image processing chains.
• (Nice to have) Exposure to graphics driver or Mesa stack development, or kernel/media paths.
• (Nice to have) Experience with robotics, AR/VR, wearables, or other real-time, resource-constrained products.

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., 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.