Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure

Details

About the Team

ChatGPT is a rapidly evolving system: new capabilities ship continuously, product surfaces change quickly, and usage patterns shift week-to-week. Supporting that pace requires infrastructure that can handle real production constraints—high concurrency, unpredictable traffic patterns, complex dependency graphs, and frequent change.

The ChatGPT Infrastructure team builds and operates the platforms that enable fast iteration without compromising performance or reliability. The team designs shared systems, data paths, rollout mechanisms, and reliability guardrails that teams rely on to ship changes to ChatGPT at scale.

The team focuses on high-leverage infrastructure: primitives and “golden paths” that incorporate operational lessons as defaults, so engineers do not need to rediscover failure modes, latency pitfalls, or integration issues each time they build something new.

About the Role

OpenAI is hiring Senior and Staff Engineers to design and build infrastructure systems that underlie ChatGPT and multiply the effectiveness of teams building user experiences.

This is not a support-only role. It is a platform-building role involving defining interfaces, developing core abstractions, and creating tooling to make safe, fast iteration the norm. The work will reduce friction, prevent regressions, improve performance, and ensure systems scale gracefully as the product grows.

Areas of Impact

• Platform foundations and frameworks: Core libraries, service frameworks, and shared components that standardize system building, integration, and evolution.
• Scalability and performance primitives: Patterns and infrastructure that reduce tail latency, improve throughput, and keep costs predictable as demand increases.
• Reliability guardrails: Mechanisms that prevent outages by design, including rate limiting, load shedding, dependency isolation, backpressure, safe fallbacks, and robust regression controls.
• Developer productivity via golden paths: Paved roads for common workflows, including data access patterns, service integration, and request lifecycle management.
• Observability and debugging systems: Instrumentation, metrics models, and investigative tooling that turn vague symptoms into precise, actionable diagnoses.
• Safe change management: Deployment and rollout systems that support rapid iteration with confidence through progressive delivery, automated verification, and fast rollback strategies.
• Interface and contract design across boundaries: Clean APIs and stable contracts that reduce coupling and enable independent evolution across a complex ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve infrastructure platforms used by many engineers and services.
• Translate real-world constraints into clean abstractions, including simple APIs, enforceable contracts, and safe defaults.
• Drive improvements in reliability and performance through principled design, measurement, and iterative hardening.
• Partner with engineering and product teams to identify systemic pain points and develop reusable solutions.
• Own outcomes end-to-end, from design and implementation through rollout and operational maturity.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, including high throughput, concurrency, and failure handling.
• Strong fundamentals in systems design, including caching, consistency, queueing and backpressure, and resilient dependency management.
• Ability to reason about performance, including latency distributions, tail behavior, and bottlenecks, and translate analysis into concrete engineering work.
• Track record of building platforms or shared infrastructure that improves velocity and correctness for other teams.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, including aligning on interfaces, navigating tradeoffs, and driving cross-team execution.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing paved roads or golden paths, including frameworks, libraries, and self-service tooling that shape engineering behavior at scale.
• Deep understanding of reliability techniques such as graceful degradation, circuit breakers, load shedding, rate limiting, and fault isolation.
• Experience building systems for safe iteration, including progressive delivery, correctness checks, automated rollout gates, and production validation.
• Strong instincts for API and contract design, including creating interfaces that are stable, evolvable, and difficult to misuse.
• Prior work demonstrating force-multiplier impact by enabling many teams through a small set of well-crafted primitives.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and does 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.

Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law. OpenAI is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Additional information is available through OpenAI's employment, privacy, and equal opportunity policies.