Systems Graphics Software Engineer

We’re seeking a Systems Graphics Software Engineer to design, optimize, and ship high-performance rendering systems for cutting-edge, real-time applications. You’ll own the full graphics stack—from GPU pipelines and display composition to performance tuning—while collaborating across camera, vision, and UX teams to deliver beautiful, responsive visuals on resource-constrained devices.

Core responsibilities:

• Build and evolve graphics runtimes and libraries (text/raster, image pipelines, materials/shaders, scene graph) for app/UI developers

• Design, implement, and optimize real-time rendering pipelines (2D/3D) using Vulkan or OpenGL ES

• Own the display and composition path: swapchains, frame pacing, vsync, color/HDR, and zero-copy buffer flow

• Establish performance/quality bars: GPU/CPU profiling, frame-time analysis, memory pressure, power/thermal budgets

• Collaborate with camera, vision, and UX to enable compositing, effects, and media/compute interop

• Drive reliability: robust startup/shutdown, crash capture, graceful GPU resets, and automated graphics tests in CI

Minimum qualifications:

• Deep experience shipping graphics or high-performance systems on Linux, Android, or iOS devices

• Experience in building UI/rendering frameworks

• Familiarity with Vulkan, Metal, or OpenGL ES

• Strong C/C++ and modern shading languages experience

• Familiarity with display pipelines and windowing/compositors (e.g. DRM/KMS, Wayland, SurfaceFlinger/HWC, macOS/iOS render server, IOMobileFramebuffer)

• Proven track record shipping real-time rendering features with tight latency, power, and memory constraints

• Fluency with profiling/debug tools (RenderDoc/Xcode Metal frame debugger, perf/ftrace/Instruments, GDB/LLDB)

• Experience in working with designers and balancing the design-engineering tradeoffs

Preferred qualifications:

• Text and 2D stacks (Skia, FreeType/HarfBuzz, CoreGraphics), vector/raster pipelines

• Color management and HDR (ICC color profiles, wide-gamut workflows)

• Compute/graphics interop (Vulkan compute, CUDA/OpenCL/Metal, external memory/semaphores) and image processing chains

• Graphics driver or Mesa stack exposure; kernel/media paths

• Experience in robotics, AR/VR, wearables, or other real-time, resource-constrained products

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. 

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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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