Software Engineer, Platform Systems

Details

About the Team

The Platform Systems team at OpenAI operates at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and large-scale distributed systems. We build the engineering and research infrastructure required to train OpenAI’s flagship models on some of the world’s largest, custom-built supercomputers.

Our team develops core model training software and works deep in the stack — spanning collective communication, compute efficiency, parallelism strategies, fault tolerance, failure detection, and observability. The systems we build are foundational to OpenAI’s research velocity, enabling reliable, efficient training at frontier scale.

We collaborate closely with researchers across the organization, continuously incorporating learnings from across OpenAI into the evolution of our training platform.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer, Platform Systems, you will design and build distributed systems that provide visibility into large-scale training workloads and help operate them reliably at scale.

You’ll work on failure detection, tracing, and observability systems that identify slow or faulty nodes, surface performance bottlenecks, and help engineers understand and optimize massive distributed training jobs. This infrastructure is critical to operating OpenAI’s training stack and is actively evolving to support new use cases and increasingly complex workloads.

This role sits at the core of our training infrastructure, blending systems engineering, performance analysis, and large-scale debugging.

Responsibilities

• Design and build distributed failure detection, tracing, and profiling systems for large-scale AI training jobs
• Develop tooling to identify slow, faulty, or misbehaving nodes and provide actionable visibility into system behavior
• Improve observability, reliability, and performance across OpenAI’s training platform
• Debug and resolve issues in complex, high-throughput distributed systems
• Collaborate with systems, infrastructure, and research teams to evolve platform capabilities
• Extend and adapt failure detection systems or tracing systems to support new training paradigms and workloads

Requirements / You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• Care deeply about performance, stability, and observability in distributed systems
• Enjoy finding and fixing issues in large-scale systems and automating operational workflows
• Have experience writing low-level software where system details matter
• Understand hardware, operating systems, networking, concurrency, and distributed systems
• Have a background in high-performance computing or low-level systems engineering
• Are excited to work on critical infrastructure that powers frontier AI research

Benefits and Compensation

• Compensation range listed: $310K - $460K (base pay may vary depending on location, knowledge, skills, and experience). Offers equity and may include performance-related bonus(es)
• 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 (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and 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 coordinated 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, etc.)

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