Compensation
$380K–$555K
Director of AI
Technical Lead, Research Inference Systems
OpenAI · AI Research & Deployment · 📍 San Francisco
OpenAI is hiring a hands-on technical lead to build and own the high-performance inference infrastructure that lets its Foundations research team rapidly experiment with frontier model architectures at real scale.
AI maturity
advanced
Company stage
scale-up
Source
ashby
Key responsibilities
- Design and build high-performance inference runtimes for large-scale AI models focusing on efficiency and scalability
- Own and optimize core execution paths including model execution, memory management, batching, and scheduling
- Develop distributed inference systems across multiple GPUs with optimized parallelism and communication patterns
- Implement and tune inference-critical operators and CUDA kernels informed by real workloads
- Partner with research teams to accurately and efficiently support new model architectures in inference
- Diagnose performance bottlenecks through profiling, benchmarking, and low-level debugging
- Ensure observability, correctness, and reliability of large-scale AI inference systems
Requirements
- Proven experience building production inference systems (not just model training or evaluation)
- Deep GPU-centric performance engineering expertise including memory behavior and latency/throughput tradeoffs
- Hands-on experience with multi-GPU or distributed inference systems involving batching, scheduling, and runtime coordination
- Ability to reason end-to-end about inference pipelines from request handling through output streaming
- Ability to bridge research ideas and real systems/performance constraints
Signals
- ⚠ Reports-to structure not disclosed — unclear where this role sits organizationally
- ⚠ Team size not specified — unclear if this is a solo TL role or leading an existing team
- ⚠ Role title (TL, Research Inference) does not map cleanly to standard C-level executive categories
- ✓ Among the highest base salary bands in the industry for this function
- ✓ Equity included at a company with significant valuation and active revenue
- ✓ Direct mandate to influence model design decisions across the research organization — high leverage
- ✓ Clear, specific scope with no ambiguity about technical depth required
- ✓ Research-enabling (not product-serving) framing suggests insulation from product roadmap pressure
- ✓ OpenAI Foundations team is central to frontier model development — strategic placement