# Software Engineer, Productivity - Inference Runtime

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** DevOps / SRE
**Salary:** $230k – $385k/yr
**Skills:** Python, CI/CD, Kubernetes, C++, Testing Infrastructure, Release Engineering, Observability, Distributed Systems, GPU, Automation
**Posted:** 2026-05-10

> Builds and improves CI/CD, testing, validation, and release tooling for OpenAI's inference runtime teams to ensure reliable, performant model deployments across ChatGPT, API, and research workloads. Requires strong Python skills, developer productivity experience, and high ownership in ambiguous environments.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Improve systems that ensure inference engine releases are correct, performant, and regression-free by evolving tooling and infrastructure for deploy gate validation
- Bring rigor to release, validation, branching, and deployment processes across the inference stack
- Improve canary, async, and large-scale validation workflows for inference systems
- Harden CI, testing, and validation infrastructure so failures are actionable and trustworthy
- Reduce noisy or flaky failures caused by infrastructure instability, GPU scheduling, or test environment issues
- Build automation for failure triage, ownership detection, debugging, and escalation
- Partner closely with inference teams, research developer productivity, engine acceleration, and infrastructure teams to improve release quality and rollout safety
- Reduce developer friction in testing, debugging, and release workflows so engineers can move faster with confidence

## Requirements
- Strong experience with **CI/CD systems**, testing infrastructure, release tooling, developer productivity, or large-scale build and validation systems
- Comfortable working in **Python**-heavy environments and debugging complex distributed systems
- **C++** experience is helpful, especially for working near inference engine code, CI build issues, or performance-sensitive systems (not required)
- High ownership, developer empathy, pragmatic, collaborative
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous areas

## Nice-to-Haves
- Excited to learn about large-scale inference systems
- Prior experience in inference environments (not required)

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