Software Engineer Systems Research Internship, Applied Emerging Talent (Summer 2026)
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About this role
About the Team
The Applied team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to the world. We seek to learn from deployment and broadly distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. We aim to make our innovative tools globally accessible, transcending geographic, economic, or platform barriers. Our commitment is to facilitate the use of AI to enhance lives, fostered by rigorous insights into how people use our products.
About the Role
A systems research internship is for people who love the real-world intersection of systems-engineering and research: you’ll investigate a hard systems problem, build something meaningful, and measure it carefully. The goal is practical impact—making Applied Systems better: more efficient, more scalable, and more reliable.
OpenAI is currently recruiting for candidates interested in a 13-week, paid, in-person internship based in our San Francisco office during Summer 2026. In some cases, it may be extended for an additional 13 weeks (for a total of up to 26 weeks), based on team needs, candidate interest, and performance.
In this role, you will typically focus on improving real systems in areas like:
Distributed systems & storage (throughput, latency, consistency, durability)
Compute & scheduling (GPU/accelerator utilization, job orchestration, queuing)
Performance engineering (profiling, bottlenecks, scalability, capacity planning)
Reliability & observability (fault tolerance, monitoring, incident learning)
Networking & data pipelines (data movement, caching, streaming efficiency)
Systems for ML (training/inference performance, evaluation infrastructure, tooling)
Most projects involve some of these steps:
Defining a clear hypothesis (“we think X will reduce latency by Y under Z”)
Instrumenting existing production systems, gathering metrics and detailed analysis to validate the hypothesis
Building or modifying a real system (prototype or production-quality improvements when appropriate)
Running experiments/benchmarks and analyzing results
Communicating tradeoffs and recommendations clearly
Publishing the research work in technical journals and conferences
Your background looks something like:
Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or relevant technical field
Proficiency with Coding in c++, Java, python, rust, etc
Doing ongoing research on systems topics such as DL/ML, information retrieval, systems security and cryptography, databases, networking, distributed systems, and compilers, etc
Ability to move fast in an environment where things are sometimes loosely defined and may have competing priorities or deadlines
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 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.