Data Scientist, Infrastructure

Details

Our infrastructure team helps deliver OpenAI’s most capable models and products to the world by scaling infrastructure and turning demand into useful FLOPS. We collaborate across research, engineering, design, and business to turn cutting-edge AI advancements into impactful, real-world applications. The team ensures the right compute is available—at the right time and place—to support some of the world’s most demanding workloads, empowering OpenAI’s products and research by scaling the infrastructure behind them.

About the Role

As a Data Scientist on the Infra team, you will play a key role in shaping how we scale the infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s products and research. You will guide the definition of foundational datasets for infrastructure resources, develop metrics that inform key decisions, build forecasting and optimization models, and establish source-of-truth dashboards and analyses that enable teams to understand and improve infra usage. You will be a core partner to engineering, research, and product teams in shaping the infrastructure that powers everything OpenAI builds.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA and uses a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain foundational datasets and metrics that reflect infrastructure usage, efficiency, and scaling.
• Develop forecasting and optimization models to support infra planning and resource allocation.
• Partner with engineering, research, and product teams to shape infrastructure strategy through data.
• Drive clarity with source-of-truth dashboards and analyses that guide infra decisions across OpenAI.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in a quantitative role navigating ambiguous environments, ideally in infrastructure, systems, or platform domains at a high-growth company or research organization.
• Experience defining and operationalizing metrics that reflect system performance, resource usage, or efficiency from the ground up.
• Strong foundation in SQL and Python, and a track record of building models and analyses that drive technical and strategic decisions.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner effectively with engineers, researchers, and product stakeholders.
• A strategic mindset that goes beyond statistical testing to surface actionable insights and long-term tradeoffs.

Nice to Have / Preferred

• Proven track record of operating as a data partner in large-scale backend systems.
• Comfortable navigating fast-paced execution while anchoring decisions in long-term impact.
• Strong programming background, with the ability to run simulations and prototype variants.
• Experience in NLP, large language models, or generative AI.

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 AI capabilities and seek to safely deploy them through our products. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides background checks and reasonable accommodations in accordance with applicable law.

Benefits

• Base pay range listed below; total compensation may include equity, performance-related bonus, and benefits.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave, plus paid medical and caregiver leave.
• Flexible PTO for exempt employees; up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and periodic company office closures.
• Mental health and wellness support, employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend, daily meals in offices, meal delivery credits, and relocation support for eligible employees.