System Performance Engineer, Consumer Devices

ABOUT THE TEAM OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Consumer Devices team is building a new generation of AI-powered products that seamlessly integrate hardware and software to create intuitive, transformative experiences. We bring together experts across embedded systems, machine learning, hardware, design, and product engineering to develop products at the intersection of AI and consumer technology. ABOUT THE ROLE OpenAI is seeking a System Performance Engineer to profile, benchmark, and optimize performance across our 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. You will help establish the performance standards that shape the user experience of our products, ensuring they remain responsive, efficient, and reliable throughout their lifecycle. This role requires deep expertise in embedded or high-performance systems, strong operating systems fundamentals, and hands-on experience debugging under tight latency, power, and memory constraints. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days per week in the office and one day working remotely. Relocation assistance is available for new hires. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: - 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. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU HAVE: - 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. 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 spectr