Software Engineer, Inference - Multi Modal - job 1 of 2

About the Team

OpenAI’s Inference team powers the deployment of our most advanced models - including our GPT models, 4o Image Generation, and Whisper - across a variety of platforms. Our work ensures these models are available, performant, and scalable in production, and we partner closely with Research to bring the next generation of models into the world. We're a small, fast-moving team of engineers focused on delivering a world-class developer experience while pushing the boundaries of what AI can do.

We’re expanding into multimodal inference, building the infrastructure needed to serve models that handle image, audio, and other non-text modalities. These workloads are inherently more heterogeneous and experimental, involving diverse model sizes and interactions, more complex input/output formats, and tighter coordination with product and research.

About the Role

We’re looking for a software engineer to help us serve OpenAI’s multimodal models at scale. You’ll be part of a small team responsible for building reliable, high-performance infrastructure for serving real-time audio, image, and other MM workloads in production.

This work is inherently cross-functional: you’ll collaborate directly with researchers training these models and with product teams defining new modalities of interaction. You'll build and optimize the systems that let users generate speech, understand images, and interact with models in ways far beyond text.

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement inference infrastructure for large-scale multimodal models.

• Optimize systems for high-throughput, low-latency delivery of image and audio inputs and outputs.

• Enable experimental research workflows to transition into reliable production services.

• Collaborate closely with researchers, infra teams, and product engineers to deploy state-of-the-art capabilities.

• Contribute to system-level improvements including GPU utilization, tensor parallelism, and hardware abstraction layers.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience building and scaling inference systems for LLMs or multimodal models.

• Have worked with GPU-based ML workloads and understand the performance dynamics of large models, especially with complex data like images or audio.

• Enjoy experimental, fast-evolving work and collaborating closely with research.

• Are comfortable dealing with systems that span networking, distributed compute, and high-throughput data handling.

• Have familiarity with inference tooling like vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or custom model parallel systems.

• Own problems end-to-end and are excited to operate in ambiguous, fast-moving spaces.

Nice to Have:

• Experience working with image generation or audio synthesis models in production.

• Exposure to distributed ML training or system-efficient model design.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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