Data Scientist, Inference Capacity Optimization

About the Role

OpenAIs Industrial Compute organization is responsible for ensuring our compute infrastructure scales efficiently to support millions of users and increasingly sophisticated AI models.

Were looking for a Data Scientist to partner closely with Capacity Systems Engineering Infrastructure Product and Research to optimize inference capacity across our global GPU fleet. This role combines statistical modeling large-scale data analysis forecasting and systems thinking to drive critical decisions around infrastructure investments performance-efficiency trade-offs and customer experience.

Youll transform complex operational data into actionable insights that directly influence how OpenAI allocates and scales one of the worlds largest AI compute environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Build statistical and machine learning models to profile and improve GPU utilization latency throughput and overall fleet efficiency.

• Develop forecasting models for inference demand across products regions and model families.

• Analyze production workloads to identify latency bottlenecks and capacity constraints highlighting optimization opportunities.

• Partner with Capacity Systems Engineering to inform infrastructure planning and long-term GPU investment strategies.

• Design experiments and simulations to evaluate scheduling policies serving strategies and infrastructure tradeoffs.

• Build dashboards and operational metrics that enable leadership to make data-driven capacity decisions.

• Collaborate with Product Research Finance and Infrastructure teams to align compute planning with business growth and model roadmaps.

• Communicate technical findings clearly to both engineering teams and executive leadership.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Statistics Computer Science Operations Research Applied Mathematics Economics or related quantitative discipline (or equivalent industry experience).

• 5 years of experience working in the infrastructure data science space.

• Strong expertise in Python and SQL.

• Experience building forecasting optimization or predictive models.

• Strong understanding of experimentation statistical inference and causal analysis.

• Experience communicating analytical insights to executive stakeholders.

Preferred Skills

• Capacity planning

• Distributed systems

• AI infrastructure

• Datacenter design and buildout

• Queueing theory

• Time-series forecasting

• Operations research

• Supply-demand modeling

• Reinforcement learning for resource allocation

• Cost optimization

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 OpenAIs 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 addition job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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