Software Engineer, High-Performance Computing Infrastructure

Job Description

Help OpenAI build some of the largest and fastest AI supercomputing clusters in the world! As a Software Engineer in High-Performance Computing Infrastructure, you’ll work at the intersection of hardware and software, designing systems that deliver the maximum possible performance for running large-scale AI models. We work at the very cutting edge of speed and scale, combining the traditions of High-Performance Computing (HPC) in a modern cloud and containerized environment. We own the entire process, starting from sourcing and system design of what components go into the machines and how they are networked together. We work with vendors to build and deliver these systems, balancing the constraints of power, cooling, network speed vs size, real estate, cost, and component supply. Once clusters arrive we validate, configure, and maintain the infrastructure for our researchers. For this role, it’s important you understand microarchitecture: how to combine CPUs, GPUs, and network devices into systems that are then deployed at a large scale to peak efficiency. You understand the lowest levels of the software platforms that sit on top of this hardware, including how to best optimize the Linux kernel and user-space code. You are capable of writing code to automate the health checks and healing of these systems, commanding a large number of servers with few people. We recently launched our newest cluster, “Owl” with over 250K cores, 10K GPUs, and 400Gbps of networking per node. This would be in the top 5 of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world. See this blog post to get a sense of what kind of challenges we solve in our day-to-day work. In this role, you will work closely with and directly accelerate machine learning researchers, but don't need to be a machine learning expert yourself. We value people who can quickly obtain a deep technical understanding of new domains and enjoy being self-directed and identifying the most important problems to solve. OpenAI has a huge compute capacity. You won’t encounter any other organization in the world with as much compute per employee. We are a small team that moves quickly, with access to huge resources, working with a direct impact on the success of OpenAI and, by extension, the field of AI as a whole.

Skills and experience we're seeking include:

• Expertise with high-performance networking, ideally with MPI, NCCL, RDMA, and/or Infiniband
• Experience with GPUs in large scale networks strongly preferred
• Deep understanding of TCP/IP and the Linux networking stack
• Experience developing high-quality software in a general-purpose programming language (Python, C, C++, Go, etc)
• Experience with virtualization and container architecture in cloud environments
• Tenacious at troubleshooting hardware and network topology failures in distributed systems
• Independently driven and able to own problems and build solutions from end-to-end
• Ideally experience with large scale data center operations, particularly thermal and power constraints
• Familiar with Kubernetes, Terraform, and/or Chef as orchestration and system tools
• Experience with Azure is a plus

About OpenAI We’re building safe Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and ensuring it leads to a good outcome for humans. We believe that unreasonably great results are best delivered by a highly creative group working in concert. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. This position is subject to a background check for any convictions directly related to its duties and responsibilities. Only job-related convictions will be considered and will not automatically disqualify the candidate. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodations via [email protected]. Benefits - Health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family - Unlimited time off (we encourage 4+ weeks per year) - Parental leave - Flexible work hours - Lunch and dinner each day - 401(k) plan with matching Apply for this job