Discovering the minutiae of backend systems

OpenAI

What first interested you in engineering?

I was fortunate to discover programming at a young age and used that as a gateway to explore other topics. In middle school, a friend introduced me to the particular flavor of the BASIC programming language included with Texas Instruments calculators (my code was predictably unmaintainable given a restriction of 27 single-letter variables per program and a heavy reliance on GOTO statements). Nevertheless, we created some simple programs, like text-based adventure games, a chat app for linked calculators, and the usual quadratic formula aide.

Later on, I wrote more complicated programs: a visual helper for illustrating Newton’s method and an orbit calculator for estimating the position of the planets and their moons, which caught the eye of my school’s Linux club. Soon, I was tussling with NDISwrapper trying to get my laptop’s CardBus-based WiFi adapter working and setting my desktop windows ablaze with Compiz! That pattern of discovery via code continued throughout high school and beyond, resulting in my engineering interest today.

What made you come to OpenAI?

At my last job, I’d moved from a backend role into a full-stack position, only to find a distaste for frontend work and UX design. I wanted to move back to a role closer to backend systems and missed the interaction with Linux environments I’d enjoyed in academia. OpenAI offered the change in work I was looking for and then some; you’d be hard-pressed to find a better fit for what I was looking for than working on OpenAI’s supercomputing clusters.

What are the problems you’re focused on solving here at OpenAI?

What do you think differentiates working on supercomputing at OpenAI from another place?

What does a typical day at OpenAI look like for you?

“OpenAI offers the opportunity to dig deep into aspects of computing ignored elsewhere.”