Head of Measurement & Performance Intelligence

About the Team The Industrial Compute team is responsible for building and operating the infrastructure platform that powers OpenAI’s research and products. The team works across hardware systems, platform architecture, performance engineering, and capacity strategy to ensure OpenAI can efficiently scale training and inference workloads on next-generation compute infrastructure. About the Role As the Head of Measurement & Performance Intelligence, you will build the function responsible for evaluating and improving the performance of OpenAI’s compute platforms. You will define how workloads are measured across new and existing systems, establish the metrics and acceptance criteria used during platform bring-up and production validation, and translate performance data into actionable guidance for architecture decisions, platform quality, capacity allocation, and vendor engagement. You will partner closely with Industrial Compute, model-serving, training, infrastructure, and external platform teams to ensure OpenAI’s systems are continuously optimized against real workload behavior at scale. We’re looking for people who combine deep systems intuition with strong operational and cross-functional leadership, and who are excited to shape how next-generation AI infrastructure is evaluated and improved. 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: Build and lead the measurement and performance intelligence function for OpenAI’s compute platforms Define platform performance metrics, benchmarking methodologies, and acceptance criteria across NPI and production environments Partner with training, inference, and infrastructure teams to evaluate real-world workload behavior and identify optimization opportunities Translate performance data into actionable recommendations for system architecture, platform quality, workload placement, and capacity strategy Drive continuous performance validation across evolving hardware, software, networking, and storage systems Work closely with external platform and hardware partners to evaluate system performance, influence roadmaps, and improve platform reliability and efficiency Establish scalable processes, tooling, and reporting frameworks for performance analysis across OpenAI’s infrastructure fleet You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience leading performance engineering, benchmarking, systems architecture, or infrastructure optimization teams at large scale Bring strong technical depth across distributed systems, AI/ML infrastructure, HPC, datacenter systems, or large-scale compute platforms Have experience defining performance metrics and validation frameworks for complex hardware or infrastructure systems Are comfortable operating across hardware, software, and infrastructure boundaries to drive measurable platform improvements Can translate highly technical performance data into clear business, operational, and strategic recommendations Thrive in highly cross-functional environments with fast-moving technical and organizational complexity Have strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence senior technical and business stakeholders internally and externally 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 . 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 contain