Performance & Systems Engineer, Codex at OpenAI in San Francisco, CA

About the Team The Codex team is responsible for building state-of-the-art AI systems that can write code, reason about software, and act as intelligent agents for developers and non-developers alike. Our mission is to push the frontier of code generation and agentic reasoning, and deploy these capabilities in real-world products such as ChatGPT and the API, as well as in next-generation tools specifically designed for agentic coding. We operate across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure—owning the full lifecycle of experimentation, deployment, and iteration on novel coding capabilities. About the Role As a Performance & Systems Engineer on the Codex team, you will be responsible for whole-system optimization across a complex, evolving stack. Codex spans LLM inference, cloud orchestration, agentic work management, and multiple product surfaces. Your job will be to identify and land high-leverage changes—across infrastructure, modeling, and product layers—that make Codex agents significantly faster and cheaper to serve. We’re looking for generalists who thrive in ambiguity and love chasing performance bottlenecks to ground. This is a high-ownership role where your work will directly improve the experience of millions of users. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Hunt down and address inefficiencies across the Codex system stack, from agent behavior to LLM inference to container orchestration, and beyond. - Build tooling to measure, profile, and optimize system performance at scale. - Collaborate with researchers and engineers to land high-ROI changes that improve latency and cost. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have experience operating across both ML systems and cloud infrastructure. - Enjoy diving into messy, ambiguous problems and emerging with clear wins. - Think holistically about performance, balancing speed, cost, and user experience. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.