Software Engineer, Infrastructure - Analytics Platform

Details

The Scaling team designs, builds, and operates critical infrastructure that enables research at OpenAI. Our mission is to accelerate research toward AGI by building core systems researchers rely on — from low-level infrastructure components to research-facing custom applications. These systems must scale with increasing workload complexity while remaining reliable and easy to use.

About the Role

We are looking for a staff-level software engineer to own production-critical infrastructure end to end. This role is centered on backend / systems engineering with emphasis on low-level performance, distributed systems, and hands-on operation of critical services at scale. You will take ambiguous problems, turn them into concrete plans, ship pragmatic solutions quickly, and improve them through production feedback and iteration. This is not a general Python backend role — we are specifically looking for strong systems experience in Rust or C++ for performance-sensitive infrastructure.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA and uses a hybrid work model (3 days in the office per week). Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Own critical infrastructure across design, implementation, rollout, operation, and iteration.
• Build and operate performant backend systems in Rust or C++ that support core research workflows.
• Design and improve distributed data and serving systems, including tradeoffs around partitioning, replication, consistency, retries, backpressure, and failure isolation.
• Debug production bottlenecks across latency, throughput, contention, hot spots, and overload behavior.
• Operate business-critical services through on-call, incident response, postmortems, observability, rollout safety, and zero-downtime migrations.
• Improve reliability of services running on Kubernetes, including resource tuning and failure handling.
• Partner closely with engineers and researchers to deliver fast, reliable, useful systems.
• Raise the bar through strong technical judgment, ownership, and follow-through.

Requirements

• Track record of owning operationally critical systems end to end and delivering outcomes in ambiguous environments.
• Strong hands-on experience building performance-sensitive backend systems in Rust or C++.
• Comfort working below typical service abstractions, including concurrency, async execution, memory behavior, serialization, I/O, networking, profiling, and failure analysis.
• Experience designing, building, or operating distributed systems or distributed databases at meaningful scale.
• Preferably, experience with ClickHouse-like systems or infrastructure for analytics, telemetry, logging, search, ingestion, storage, or query execution.
• Hands-on experience operating production-critical systems, including incidents, observability, rollout safety, and recurrence prevention.
• Strong judgment in balancing engineering quality, speed, risk, and business impact.
• A habit of shipping practical first versions and improving them through production feedback.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of AI capabilities and seek to safely deploy them through our products. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Benefits

• Competitive base pay (see posted range) plus generous equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts: Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter benefits.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Flexible paid time off 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.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.