Software Engineer - Data Acquisition (Systems)

Details

This team builds and operates the systems that enable OpenAI researchers to run reliable, scalable, and efficient research workflows. The work spans software engineering, infrastructure, systems administration, cluster operations, and reliability engineering.

The role involves building and operating infrastructure that supports frontier research and critical research-facing systems. It focuses on systems close to the metal while also requiring software development to improve networking, bootstrapping, Kubernetes, scalability, automation, and reliability. This is a strong fit for an independent, high-ownership engineer who enjoys reliability-heavy infrastructure work, debugging complex systems, and supporting researchers.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate reliable infrastructure for research workloads and research-facing services.
• Support and improve systems across data infrastructure, processing, crawl and ingest, caching, search, observability, and cluster-wide services.
• Improve cluster bootstrapping, provisioning, automation, and deployment workflows.
• Debug issues across networking, compute, storage, orchestration, and service reliability layers.
• Build software and automation that reduce manual operational work and improve system reliability.
• Partner with researchers, infrastructure engineers, and service owners to understand system needs and translate them into durable solutions.
• Evolve existing infrastructure toward more scalable, maintainable, and standard patterns.
• Take ownership of critical systems and drive work independently from problem definition through execution.

Requirements

• Strong systems fundamentals and an understanding of how infrastructure scales in practice.
• Comfort with Linux, networking, Kubernetes, provisioning, and distributed systems operations.
• Ability to write software to automate, debug, and improve infrastructure systems.
• Strong execution mindset and ability to independently drive ambiguous infrastructure work.
• Interest in supporting a wide range of systems, from research tooling to platform services.
• Pragmatic judgment about when to build custom systems versus using existing, well-supported tools.
• Commitment to building reliable systems that make researchers faster and reduce operational friction.

Nice to Have

• Experience with PXE boot, cluster provisioning, bare-metal infrastructure, or large-scale fleet management.
• Experience operating Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems at scale.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, or deployment automation.
• Experience supporting search infrastructure, data platforms, ingest systems, or large-scale research workflows.
• Experience with Git-based workflows and internal developer tooling.
• Prior experience in environments where reliability, scale, and speed all matter.

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 provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.

Benefits

• Base salary range of $255,000–$405,000 per year.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.