Software Engineer, Infrastructure Reliability

Details

About the Team

We’re hiring software engineers to join our broader Infrastructure organization, which supports multiple high-impact teams. Depending on your interests and experience, you could work on one of several focus areas — including Core Distributed Systems, Databases, Observability, or Cloud Infrastructure. All teams operate with a high degree of autonomy and are deeply collaborative, with a shared mandate to raise the bar on safety, reliability, and velocity across OpenAI.

About the Role

You’ll be at the heart of scaling and hardening the infrastructure that powers some of the most widely used AI systems in the world. You’ll help ensure our systems are highly reliable, observable, performant, and secure — so researchers can iterate quickly, and products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API can serve millions of users safely and effectively.

This is a hands-on, high-leverage role for engineers who thrive on ownership, love solving deep technical problems across the stack, and want to work on systems that support cutting-edge research and deploy at global scale. You’ll play a key part in shaping technical direction, proactively improving system resilience, and collaborating closely with infra, product, and research teams to turn complex infrastructure into reliable platforms.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate reliable and performant systems used across engineering.
• Identify and fix performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies, ensuring our infrastructure can scale to the next order of magnitude.
• Dig deep to resolve complex issues.
• Continuously improve automation to reduce manual work. Improve internal tooling and our developer experience.
• Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and the development of best practices around system reliability and scalability.

Requirements

• Deep understanding of distributed systems principles and a proven track record in building and operating scalable and reliable systems.
• A keen eye for performance and optimization; experience squeezing the most performance out of complex, globally-distributed systems.
• Experience operating orchestration systems such as Kubernetes at scale and building abstractions over cloud platforms.
• Comfortable working in Linux environments, and with tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure that reliability and scalability are considered in design and development.
• A humble attitude, eagerness to help colleagues, ownership of problems end-to-end, and the ability to learn missing knowledge to get the job done.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of relevant industry experience, with 2+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead.
• Proven experience as a reliability engineer, production engineer, or similar role in a fast-paced, rapidly scaling company.
• Strong proficiency in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) and IaC tools such as Terraform. Proficiency in programming/scripting languages.
• Experience with containerization technologies and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
• Experience with observability tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, and the ELK stack.
• Experience with microservices architecture and service mesh technologies.
• Knowledge of security best practices in cloud environments.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, and database technologies.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

Benefits

• Base pay range shown for this role: $255,000 - $405,000 (USD). Total compensation may include equity and performance-related bonus(es).
• 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.
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and multiple company office closures for focus and recharge.
• 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) as applicable.

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 to the world through our products. We are an equal opportunity employer and are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.