Infrastructure Engineering Lead, IT

Details

The Infrastructure Engineering function sits within IT and is responsible for reliably building, deploying, and operating critical on-prem and hybrid environments that power internal services and critical R&D environments.

This is a new, bootstrap team focused on applying strong Site Reliability Engineering discipline to environments where uptime, safety, recoverability, and security are non-negotiable. The team replaces bespoke, one-off infrastructure with standardized infrastructure-as-code building blocks that compound reliability and operational leverage as OpenAI scales.

About the Role

We are looking for an Infrastructure Engineering Lead to design, build, and operate reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure that underpins identity, access, endpoint, and shared platform services across the company. You will own infrastructure and identity systems end to end, from foundational design and provisioning through policy enforcement, upgrades, recovery, and day-two operations. You will establish durable, production-grade platforms that remove operational friction, enforce security by default, and enable teams to move faster with confidence. This role is based in our San Francisco HQ and requires in-office presence.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve infrastructure patterns for on-prem and hybrid environments, including self-hosted platforms, vendor-supported systems, and lab environments.
• Establish standardized, production-grade deployment and operational models that replace bespoke implementations.
• Partner with IT, Security, Identity, and Network teams to ensure infrastructure meets reliability, security, and access requirements by design.
• Design and mature the production architecture for IAM-adjacent platforms such as Microsoft Entra using SRE principles.
• Establish common management rules and shared resources within Azure subscriptions to ensure consistent, policy-aligned operations.
• Own the full lifecycle of infrastructure systems, including deployment, upgrades, patching, recovery, and ongoing operations.
• Operate and harden shared infrastructure provisioned through Infra Terraform, ensuring repeatability, auditability, and safe change management.
• Design and implement infrastructure as code and configuration management to support shared services, identity-adjacent systems, and endpoint platforms using tools like Chef, Ansible, and Terraform.
• Build and operate monitoring, alerting, and incident response mechanisms to meet high availability and recoverability targets.
• Lead incident response and postmortems across infrastructure, identity-adjacent platforms, and fleet systems, driving durable fixes and shared learning.
• Build and operate containerized and platform services, including Kubernetes and Docker-based workloads, using DevOps practices that emphasize reliability, repeatability, and safe change management.
• Use Git-based workflows as the source of truth for infrastructure and policy changes, enabling review, auditability, and safe, reversible automation.
• Identify high-leverage automation opportunities that eliminate manual toil and reduce operational risk across infrastructure and access-related systems.
• Implement guardrails, safety mechanisms, and progressive rollout patterns for infrastructure and policy enforcement changes.
• Ensure automation is safe, observable, and resilient under failure conditions, particularly for shared services and high blast radius systems.
• Work closely with Security, Identity, Network, Client Platform, and Platform Engineering teams to operate secure, policy-enforced infrastructure.
• Coach and elevate engineers and partner teams through design reviews, incidents, and operational improvements; drive reliability improvements across teams, even without direct authority.

Requirements

• 10 or more years of experience operating and architecting mission-critical infrastructure in high-reliability environments.
• Experience leading the design and maturation of complex on-prem, hybrid, or cloud-integrated systems, setting durable architectural patterns used by multiple teams.
• Apply Site Reliability Engineering principles at scale, using observability, automation, and incident learnings to materially reduce risk and operational toil.
• Operate comfortably in ambiguity, making sound architectural decisions under pressure while staying close to technical detail.
• Influence cross-functional partners across security, identity, network, and platform teams to land reliability improvements without direct authority.

Nice to have

• Experience operating infrastructure for R&D or specialized labs, manufacturing, or other safety-critical environments where uptime and recoverability are essential.
• Hands-on experience with fleet, endpoint, or virtual desktop platforms such as FleetDM, Chef, or Azure Virtual Desktop.
• Experience partnering closely with identity or security engineering teams on hardened, policy-enforced infrastructure at scale.

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. We are an equal opportunity employer and provide background checks and accommodations consistent with applicable law.

Benefits

• Base pay range listed: $225K–$275K (base pay may vary depending on market location, knowledge, skills, and experience).
• In addition to base salary, total compensation includes equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit).
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave and paid medical/caregiver leave.
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and multiple company office closures throughout the year.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.