Software Engineer, Engineering Acceleration | Consumer Devices

at OpenAI
USD 230,000-342,000 per year
SENIOR
✅ Hybrid
✅ Relocation

Used Tools & Technologies

PostgreSQL

Required Skills & Competences

Security @ 4 Kafka @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 Terraform @ 4 CI/CD @ 4 Debugging @ 4 GPU @ 4 Observability @ 4 AI @ 4

Details

At OpenAI | Consumer Devices, you won’t just build products—you’ll help shape the future of how humanity interacts with intelligence. 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. The team uses a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and 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 current 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

  • 7+ 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 communicator who can 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 include Terraform, Buildkite, Bazel, Postgres, Cosmos DB, Kafka, and Kubernetes.

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, diverse perspectives, and equal opportunity. Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Benefits

  • Base salary range disclosed ($230K–$342K) plus equity and potential performance-related bonuses.
  • 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 and paid company holidays/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.