--- title: 'Training - Runtime Foundations Engineer at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/training-runtime-foundations-engineer-openai-san-francisco-sagz2016gt8s' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Training - Runtime Foundations Engineer at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-03-09 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/0fc4742f-21f9-40a3-925e-adeb0a6920c1/application **Skills:** Python, Rust, C++, Linux, Distributed Systems, Asynchronous Systems, Concurrent Systems, Performance Analysis, Memory Profiling > Design and build high-performance distributed runtime systems in Rust to orchestrate and monitor massive machine learning workloads across supercomputers. The role focuses on optimizing performance, reliability, and observability for distributed training infrastructure. ## Job description ## About the Team Training Runtime designs the core distributed runtime that powers everything from early research experiments to frontier-scale model runs. We build robust, scalable, high performance components to support our distributed training workloads. Our priorities are to maximize the productivity of our researchers and our hardware, accelerating progress towards AGI. Within Training Runtime, the Runtime Foundations team develops the distributed OS responsible for orchestrating the large numbers of processes that make up modern training workloads and providing all necessary observability and resilience to operate in frontier scale environments. Our runtime sits beneath training frameworks and on top of research infrastructure, ensuring jobs run reliably across massive clusters while maintaining performance, stability, and observability. Success for us is measured by both system reliability and researcher velocity - enabling ideas to scale from experiments to production training runs. ## About the Role As a Training Runtime: Runtime Foundations Engineer, you will work on the software that ties thousands of computers together and exposes them as a unified system. This system has to serve individual researchers running multiple parallel experiments, as well as our largest training runs spanning 100’s of thousands and even millions of machines and accelerators. This requires easy to use, introspectable systems that can promote a fast debugging and development cycle, as well as relentless optimization for scale while maintaining stability and performance throughout. You will work primarily in Codex + Rust, building high-performance asynchronous systems with a strong emphasis on performance, correctness, resilience, and scalability. Working at this scale and at the frontier of AI development poses novel challenges. We support many different types of research, and the problems you will be working on are highly ambiguous and require a superb ability to jump into novel domains, understand user problems, and demonstrate both strong design judgment and proficient execution to advance our programs. We’re looking for people who love optimizing an end-to-end platform, understanding high-performance architectures to maximize both local and distributed performance across our supercomputers. We’re looking for engineers excited by the rapid pace of responding to the dynamic and evolving needs of our training runtime and compute stack. 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: - Work across our Python and Rust stack - Design, build, and maintain software to orchestrate and monitor machine learning workloads on our largest supercomputers - Profile and optimize our software stack to support computation orchestration at frontier scale - Improve reliability, observability, and fault tolerance for long-running jobs - Debug complex distributed systems issues across large clusters - Respond to the changing shapes and needs of the ML systems to enable our researchers You might thrive in this role if you: - Have experience developing distributed systems - Enjoy understanding how large systems behave and fail at scale - Love being both a developer and an operator - Care deeply about performance, correctness, and reliability - Have strong software engineering skills and are proficient in Rust or another systems programming language (e.g. C++) - Have solid Linux knowledge, and are comfortable with systems-level debugging, performance analysis, and memory profiling - Are comfortable and experienced in developing asynchronous and concurrent systems - Like high-ownership environments with light process and strong engineering agency ## 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. ## About OpenAI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. - **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO. - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: 2015 - **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment - **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models) - **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity. ## Products & Services - **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows. - **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.). - **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions. - **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system. - **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026). ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials. - **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. - **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models. ## Competitive Advantages - **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI. - **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent. - **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference. - **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products. ## Strategic Focus - **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance). - **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses. - **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026). - **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus. - **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget. - **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI. - **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications. ## Sources 1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/) 2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/) 3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search) 4. 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