Software Engineer, Infrastructure Reliability

Details

About the Team

We’re hiring Software Engineers to join our Applied Infrastructure organization, and more specifically for our Database Systems and Online Storage teams. These 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.

Role overview

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 developer experience.
• Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and the development of best practices around system reliability and scalability.

Qualifications / Requirements

• 4+ years of relevant industry experience, with 2+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead.
• A passion for distributed systems at scale with a focus on reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement.
• Proven experience as a reliability engineer, production engineer, or a similar role in a fast-paced, rapidly scaling company.
• Strong proficiency in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) and infrastructure-as-code 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.
• Comfortable working in Linux environments, and with tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

You might also thrive in this role if you:

• Have a deep understanding of distributed systems principles and a proven track record in building and operating scalable and reliable systems.
• Have a keen eye for performance and optimization for globally-distributed systems.
• Are experienced in collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure reliability and scalability are considered in design and development.
• Have a humble attitude, are eager to help colleagues, and own problems end-to-end.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change.

Benefits

• Base pay range listed for the role; total compensation includes equity and potential performance-related bonuses.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave and paid medical and caregiver leave.
• Flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional company 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 (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends) as eligible.

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, diversity, and inclusive hiring practices. Background checks and accommodations for applicants with disabilities are described in the posting.