System Performance Engineer, Consumer Devices

OpenAI is seeking a System Performance Engineer to profile, benchmark, and optimize performance across its embedded hardware products. In this role, you will work across operating systems, applications, camera and vision, graphics, and platform teams to define product KPIs, build performance tooling, and drive optimizations from early lab characterization through product launch and real-world usage.

Responsibilities:

• Develop system performance benchmarks, methodologies, and policies to evaluate end-to-end product behavior.
• Profile and analyze performance across key product use cases and workloads using custom and industry-standard profiling tools.
• Partner closely with engineering teams to identify bottlenecks and drive performance optimizations across the software stack.
• Define high-level product KPIs and establish measurement frameworks to measure launch readiness and monitor performance throughout the product lifecycle.
• Measure, report, and track metrics including system responsiveness, memory utilization, cold boot performance, long-term stability, and behavior under constrained conditions such as thermal limits and low battery states.
• Investigate field performance regressions and drive issues to resolution using data-driven analysis.

Requirements:

• Deep experience shipping embedded or high-performance systems on Linux, Android, or iOS devices.
• Strong proficiency in C/C++, Python, or Rust, with exceptional operating systems fundamentals, including process management, IPC, drivers, interrupts, power management, media frameworks, graphics, filesystems, and networking.
• A proven track record shipping real-time systems operating under tight latency, power, and memory constraints.
• Expertise with profiling and debugging tools such as Perfetto, GDB, LLDB, perf, ftrace, or Instruments.
• Experience building instrumentation, analytics, and performance tuning frameworks.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with statistics, experimentation methodologies, or data science concepts.
• Experience collaborating cross-functionally with embedded software, systems, camera and vision, audio, graphics, applications, and hardware teams.
• Experience defining product KPIs, benchmarking methodologies, and launch readiness metrics for hardware products.
• Experience investigating field performance regressions and driving fixes through cross-functional collaboration.

Compensation:

• $293K – $325K • Offers Equity
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.