Skip to content
OpenAIOpenAISan Francisco, CA

3P Architect

Defines rack- and cluster-level reference architectures for AI infrastructure, translates workload requirements into designs, collaborates with partners and modeling teams to evaluate tradeoffs, and drives vendor roadmaps to address technology gaps.

342k – 555k/yr
HybridDevOps / SRE

About the role

Key Responsibilities

  • Define rack- and cluster-level reference architectures for AI infrastructure deployments.
  • Translate workload requirements into clear system design specifications and partner deliverables.
  • Collaborate with performance modeling teams to evaluate architectural tradeoffs and system behaviors.
  • Align internal stakeholders and external partners on critical system attributes (performance, cost, power, reliability, scalability).
  • Identify gaps in current technology offerings and drive vendors (ODM/JDM, silicon, networking) to close those gaps.
  • Influence and shape vendor roadmaps to meet future infrastructure needs.
  • Track emerging technologies and evaluate their applicability to AI systems.
  • Define and lead proof-of-concept (PoC) efforts to validate new architectures and technologies.
  • Act as a key interface between OpenAI and external partners, ensuring execution against design intent.

Qualifications

  • Strong experience in system architecture for large-scale infrastructure or data center environments.
  • Understand AI workload characteristics and how they map to system-level design decisions.
  • Comfortable working with performance modeling outputs to inform architectural direction.
  • Experience working with or managing hardware vendors (ODM/JDM, silicon, networking).
  • Can drive alignment across multiple stakeholders with competing constraints.
  • Track record of turning ambiguous requirements into clear, executable system designs.
  • Proactive in identifying gaps and driving solutions across organizational boundaries.

Preferred Skills

  • Experience defining rack- or cluster-level systems for hyperscale or AI workloads.
  • Familiarity with accelerators (GPUs/ASICs), interconnects, and data center networking architectures.
  • Experience influencing vendor roadmaps and reference designs.
  • Background in infrastructure deployment, hardware engineering, or systems integration.
  • Experience leading PoCs or early-stage hardware validation efforts.

Skills

AI InfrastructureSystem ArchitecturePerformance ModelingGpusAsicsInterconnectsData Center NetworkingOdmJdmRack DesignCluster Design

Similar roles

DevOps / SRE jobs
OpenAI

Workload Porting & Performance Engineer

OpenAISan Francisco, CA +1

Evaluates new hardware platforms by porting benchmarks and workloads, analyzes performance across compute/memory/networking, identifies bottlenecks, and optimizes for AI systems. Requires expertise in performance analysis, system architecture, and debugging across hardware/software boundaries.

342k – 555k/yr
HybridDevOps / SRE
Thinking Machines Lab

Reliability Engineer, Supercomputing

Thinking Machines LabSan Francisco, CA

Ensure reliability of large GPU supercomputing clusters by diagnosing hardware/firmware/OS issues, automating monitoring, driving firmware rollouts, and working directly with vendors.

350k – 475k/yr
On-siteDevOps / SRE
Thinking Machines Lab

Network Engineer, Supercomputing

Thinking Machines LabSan Francisco, CA

Own and debug multi-thousand-GPU network fabric (RDMA/RoCE, NVLink/NVSwitch) for large-scale AI training and inference. Requires backend language proficiency, large-scale cluster experience, and cross-stack ownership.

350k – 475k/yr
On-siteDevOps / SRE
Anthropic

Performance Engineer, Inference Systems

AnthropicSan Francisco, CA +2

Performance engineer focused on cross-layer investigations of Anthropic's inference fleet for Claude, optimizing throughput, latency, reliability, and correctness while building observability and partnering with kernel and serving teams.

350k – 850k/yr
HybridDevOps / SRE
Thinking Machines Lab

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Thinking Machines LabSan Francisco, CA

Site Reliability Engineer drives end-to-end reliability for AI fine-tuning platform Tinker, including SLOs, monitoring, incident response, and multi-tenant GPU scheduling. Requires distributed systems experience, software proficiency for reliability, and production incident handling.

350k – 475k/yr
On-siteDevOps / SRE