Technical Lead, Multimodal Infrastructure
OpenAI
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Research
Compensation
- $460K • Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.
This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.
About the Team
The Multimodal Research team at OpenAI is building the next generation of AI systems that can understand and generate content across multiple modalities—including text, audio, images, and video. The team’s mission is to unlock new capabilities by enabling models to process and reason about diverse data types simultaneously.
This team sits at the intersection of cutting-edge research and production, and plays a central role in shaping OpenAI's multimodal offerings—from speech-to-speech agents to video understanding and image generation. Recent projects include real-time voice agents, modular speech components, and fine-tuning pipelines that support product launches like GPT-4o
About the Role
As a TL (Tech Lead) for the multimodal infrastructure team, you will help provide technical leadership to a high-caliber team of ML infrastructure engineers supporting every multimodal research initiative at OpenAI. This is a deeply technical, high-impact role at the intersection of systems engineering and ML research. You’ll be responsible for both driving technical direction and supporting the growth and execution of the team.
We’re looking for people who are passionate about enabling world-class research through robust, scalable infrastructure and excited by the unique challenges of multimodal systems at massive scale.
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:
Provide technical leadership to a hands-on team building infrastructure for large-scale multimodal research.
Collaborate closely with researchers and engineers across OpenAI to support diverse, product-facing multimodal projects.
Design, build, and operate software systems for training and evaluating ML models on complex, high-volume multimodal data.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Are highly technical.
Have strong software engineering skills and experience building high-performance infrastructure.
Understand or are excited to learn about ML systems, especially those involving large-scale training or multimodal data.
Have experience with model training infrastructure, ML performance optimization or kernel development, large scale multimodal data pipelines, and ML developer tools
Excel at cross-functional leadership—able to prioritize across projects and build strong partnerships across research and infrastructure teams.
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.
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.
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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.
Compensation Range: $460K