About the Team
The Sora team is pioneering multimodal capabilities for OpenAI’s foundation models. We’re a hybrid research and product team focused on integrating multimodal functionalities into our AI products, ensuring they are reliable, user-friendly, and aligned with our mission of broad societal benefit.
About the Role
We’re looking for a Tech Lead / Staff-Level Engineer to drive improvements in model serving efficiency for Sora. This is a high-impact role where you’ll lead initiatives to optimize inference performance and scalability. You’ll also be engaged in model design, to ensure that trained models will best meet the deployment requirements. You’ll work closely with leadership and the broader team, supporting and mentoring a growing group of junior engineers, while helping to shape the future of our model inference stack.
This role is critical to scaling the team’s broader goals - it will directly enable leadership to focus on higher-leverage initiatives by building a stronger technical foundation.
In this role you will:
Lead engineering efforts focused on improving model serving, inference performance, and system efficiency
Provide technical mentorship and oversight for a junior engineering team
Drive optimizations from a kernel and data movement perspective to improve system throughput and reliability
Partner closely with research and product teams to ensure our models perform effectively at scale
Design, build, and improve critical serving infrastructure to support Sora’s growth and reliability needs
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have deep expertise in model performance optimization, particularly at the inference layer
Have a strong background in kernel-level systems, data movement, and low-level performance tuning
Enjoy mentoring and guiding junior engineers without needing formal management responsibilities
Are excited about scaling high-performing AI systems that serve real-world, multimodal workloads
Can navigate ambiguity, set technical direction, and drive complex initiatives to completion
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.
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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.
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For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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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.