Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Details

About the Team

The Infrastructure organization supports multiple high-impact teams. Depending on interests and experience, software engineers may work in Core Distributed Systems, Reliability Engineering, Observability, Developer Productivity, Cloud Infrastructure, or Databases.

About the Role

Build distributed, scalable infrastructure that supports OpenAI's products, including ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. The role involves working with stakeholders to understand infrastructure, data, and compute needs and setting technical strategy for research and product development. Engineers will solve complex problems at scale while ensuring performance, scalability, and reliability.

Team Focus Areas

• Distributed Systems: Build and own highly scalable, available, performant, and reliable distributed systems and their building blocks.
• Systems Engineering: Debug system bottlenecks, evolve core infrastructure, and solve novel performance and scalability problems across the stack.
• Reliability Engineering: Build scalable, fault-tolerant systems and contribute to service health, incident response, and resilience efforts.
• Observability: Design and maintain metrics, logging, and tracing tooling for visibility into production systems at scale.
• Developer Productivity: Create tools, environments, and workflows that help engineers ship high-quality software faster and more safely.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Own cloud-native compute, networking, and storage infrastructure supporting services and research workloads.
• Databases: Build high-performance, distributed database systems for OpenAI's product stack.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain reliable and performant systems used across engineering.
• Define technical strategy, architecture, and long-term goals with the team.
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and researchers to build infrastructure that meets evolving needs.
• Improve internal tooling, automation, and developer experience.
• Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and best practices for system reliability and scalability.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering skills and experience with Python, Go, C++, Rust, or similar languages.
• Experience designing, operating, or scaling distributed systems or developer infrastructure.
• Comfort working in Linux environments and with Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks.
• Ability to navigate complex systems and debug challenging issues.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, particularly in cross-functional settings.
• 4+ years of relevant industry experience, including 2+ years leading large-scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead.
• Passion for distributed systems at scale, with a focus on reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement.
• Ability to build consensus among internal and external stakeholders.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company 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 $210,000–$405,000 per year, plus equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax Flexible Spending Accounts and commuter benefits.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Flexible paid time off for exempt employees and up to 15 paid days annually for non-exempt employees.
• Paid company holidays and office closures.
• 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.