Senior Staff Software Engineer, Engineering Acceleration | Consumer Devices

Details

About the Team

At OpenAI | Consumer Devices, you won’t just build products—you’ll help shape the future of how humanity interacts with intelligence. The team collaborates with research, engineering, and operations to create products at global scale.

About the Role

The Engineering Acceleration-focused engineer on the Consumer Device Infrastructure team builds the CI/CD systems, developer workflows, and internal platform capabilities that help engineers develop, test, ship, and debug software across device and cloud surfaces. This is a highly hands-on senior engineering role focused on CI/CD, software build and deployment pipelines, and developer productivity. You will design and build the technical foundations that improve engineering velocity, reduce toil, and increase software quality. You will also make pragmatic architecture and platform decisions based on the organization’s stage, scaling needs, and security requirements.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA and uses a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week. The company offers relocation assistance to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate CI/CD systems and software delivery pipelines for software that runs both on device and in the cloud.
• Lead the design and architecture of internal platform capabilities across build, test, deployment, workflow automation, and developer tooling.
• Make hands-on technical decisions about platform design, abstraction boundaries, and system tradeoffs based on the team’s stage, scale, and operational needs.
• Improve developer productivity by shortening feedback loops across build, test, debugging, environment setup, and release-adjacent workflows.
• Build self-serve paved-road workflows that reduce manual effort and make common engineering tasks fast, reliable, and easy to adopt.
• Use AI-native tooling and automation to improve engineering workflows, failure triage, and developer output quality.
• Build secure-by-default platform capabilities, including access controls, secrets and credential handling, artifact permissions, auditability, and policy enforcement in software delivery workflows.
• Partner closely with product, systems, release, quality, and infrastructure teams to understand pain points and turn them into durable platform improvements.
• Define and track metrics for platform health and engineering effectiveness, including build times, queue times, failure rates, flaky failures, and deployment lead time.
• Guide engineering teams on pragmatic observability, reliability, and scalability choices for the systems they build.
• Participate in the on-call rotation for the systems owned by the team.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years building developer productivity, CI/CD, internal platform, or engineering systems.
• Deep experience designing and operating robust CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and software delivery infrastructure for complex products.
• Strong track record of personally building platform features and workflow improvements that materially increased engineering velocity, reliability, or developer experience.
• Experience making architectural decisions for internal platforms, including when to standardize, when to abstract, and when to keep systems simple.
• Experience adapting technical decisions to the maturity and scaling stage of an organization, balancing speed, reliability, maintainability, and adoption.
• Working knowledge of secure software delivery practices such as least-privilege access, secrets management, policy enforcement, auditability, or software supply chain hardening.
• Strong empathy for the tools, workflows, and frustrations that create toil or slow engineering teams down; comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-changing environments and bringing structure where needed.
• Clear communication and ability to work effectively across teams with different priorities, constraints, and technical needs.

Technical Context

At the heart of the infrastructure is a large-scale deployment of CPU/GPU nodes running in Kubernetes clusters across regions. The team builds secure systems that support software running on device and in the cloud. Some core technologies mentioned: Terraform, Buildkite, Bazel, Postgres, Cosmos DB, Kafka, and more.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety and diverse perspectives in building and deploying AI systems.

Benefits

• Base salary range listed in the posting and equity; total compensation may include bonuses and other components.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts (Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, commuter expenses).
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave and paid medical/caregiver leave.
• Flexible PTO (exempt) and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees; 13+ paid company holidays and coordinated office closures.
• 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 (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends).