Tech Lead, Model Serving Efficiency

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.

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.

• 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

• 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.

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.

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.

$460K - $555K. Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity and benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family
• Mental health and wellness support
• 401(k) plan with 50% matching
• Generous time off, many company holidays, and multiple coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge.
• Paid parental leave (24 weeks paid birth-parent leave & 20-week paid parental leave) and family‑planning support
• Annual learning & development stipend ($1,500 per year)