Inference Technical Lead, On-Device Transformers

As a Technical Lead on the Future of Computing Research team, you will work together with both the best ML researchers in the world and the greatest design talent of our generation to push the frontier of model capabilities.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We follow a hybrid model with 4 days a week in the office and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Evaluate and select silicon platforms (GPUs, NPUs, and specialized accelerators) for on-device and edge deployment of OpenAI models.
• Work closely with research teams to co-design model architectures that meet real-world deployment constraints such as latency, memory, power, and bandwidth.
• Analyze and model system performance, identifying tradeoffs between model design, memory hierarchy, compute throughput, and hardware capabilities.
• Partner with hardware vendors and internal infrastructure teams to bring up new accelerators and ensure efficient execution of transformer workloads.
• Build and lead a team of engineers responsible for implementing the low-level inference stack, including kernel development and runtime systems.
• Run through the necessary walls to take nascent research capabilities and turn them into capabilities we can build on top of.

• Have experience evaluating or deploying workloads on GPUs, NPUs, or other specialized accelerators.
• Understand the performance characteristics of transformer models, including attention, KV-cache behavior, and memory bandwidth requirements.
• Have designed or optimized high-performance compute systems, such as inference engines, distributed runtimes, or hardware-aware ML pipelines.
• Have experience building or leading teams working on low-level performance-critical software such as CUDA kernels, compilers, or ML runtimes.
• Have already spent time in the weeds teaching models to speak and perceive.

medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, parental leave, paid time off, paid holidays, 401(k), retirement plan United States, California, San Francisco Apr 14, 2026

About the Team

The Future of Computing Research team is an applied research team in the Consumer Devices group focused on developing new methods and models to support our vision as we advance forward in our mission of building AGI that benefits all of humanity.

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.