Performance Modeling Engineer

United States, California, San Francisco 3180 18th Street (Show on map) Aug 19, 2026

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops system and infrastructure solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. We work closely with architecture, infrastructure, and vendor teams to evaluate system performance and guide critical design decisions.

Our team focuses on building and applying performance modeling frameworks to understand system behavior, quantify tradeoffs, and inform next-generation infrastructure design.

About the Role

We are seeking Performance Modeling Engineers to develop and apply modeling tools that evaluate AI system performance and inform architectural decisions.

In this role, you will work closely with the Performance Modeling Lead and partner teams to analyze system behavior, run simulations or analytical models, and help quantify tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, and storage. You will contribute to building modeling frameworks and applying them to real-world questions that impact system design and vendor decisions.

This role is well-suited for engineers with strong software or modeling backgrounds who are interested in developing deeper expertise in system architecture and AI infrastructure., * Develop and maintain performance modeling tools and frameworks.

• Build models to evaluate system behavior across:
• compute, memory, and interconnect subsystems
• distributed system scaling and bottlenecks.
• Run simulations and analytical models to support architectural tradeoff analysis.
• Collaborate with performance modeling lead and system architects to answer forward-looking design questions.
• Analyze and interpret modeling outputs, translating results into actionable insights.
• Validate models against real system measurements and workload behavior.
• Contribute to improving modeling fidelity, usability, and scalability.

• Strong software engineering or modeling background (e.g., simulation, systems modeling, or performance analysis).
• Familiarity with system architecture fundamentals (compute, memory, networking).
• Experience with programming and building technical tools or frameworks.
• Ability to reason about performance bottlenecks and scaling behavior.
• Strong analytical skills and comfort working with quantitative models.
• Ability to collaborate across teams and learn new system domains quickly.

Preferred Skills

• Exposure to AI/ML workloads or distributed systems.
• Experience with simulation tools, performance modeling, or systems analysis.
• Familiarity with data center infrastructure or large-scale systems.
• Experience working with performance data, benchmarking, or profiling tools.
• Interest in system architecture and hardware/software co-design.

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.