Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure

Details

ChatGPT Infrastructure builds and operates the platforms that make fast, safe iteration possible for the teams shipping ChatGPT at scale. The team focuses on shared systems, data paths, rollout mechanisms, and reliability guardrails to support high concurrency, unpredictable traffic, complex dependencies, and frequent change.

Responsibilities

• Design and build infrastructure platforms and shared components used by many engineers and services.
• Translate real-world constraints into clean abstractions: simple APIs, enforceable contracts, and safe defaults.
• Drive reliability and performance improvements through principled design, measurement, and iterative hardening.
• Partner across engineering and product to identify systemic pain points and turn them into reusable solutions.
• Own outcomes end-to-end: design → implementation → rollout → operational maturity.

Where You Can Have Impact / Areas of Work

You may work on one or more of the following:

• Platform foundations & frameworks: core libraries, service frameworks, and shared components.
• Scalability & performance primitives: reduce tail latency, improve throughput, and keep costs predictable.
• Reliability guardrails: rate limiting, load shedding, dependency isolation, backpressure, and safe fallbacks.
• Developer productivity via golden paths: paved roads for common workflows (data access, service integration, request lifecycles).
• Observability & debugging systems: instrumentation, metrics models, and investigative tooling.
• Safe change management: deployment and rollout systems, progressive delivery, automated verification, and fast rollback.
• Interface and contract design across boundaries: clean APIs and stable contracts to reduce coupling.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

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

Preferred Qualifications

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

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, diversity of perspectives, and equal employment opportunity. Background checks and reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities are noted in the posting.

Benefits

• Base pay range listed in the posting; total compensation may include equity and performance-related bonuses.
• 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 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 additional 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) may be provided.