Software Engineer, Product Velocity

Details

The ChatGPT Velocity team owns the health of the end-to-end developer and deployment loop for ChatGPT-facing services. Its mission is to help ChatGPT engineers ship confidently through a fast, lightweight development cycle and a trusted path to production.

The team works across local environments, Bazel builds, CI, tests, merges, release candidates, deployments, synthetics, alerts, and production health to reduce development friction and improve reliability.

Responsibilities

• Reduce local development startup and iteration latency for ChatGPT engineers.
• Improve Bazel and build performance for local machines, devboxes, and CI, including cache effectiveness, reproducibility, disk usage, remote cache behavior, and observability into invalidations.
• Improve CI reliability and merge throughput by reducing unrelated failures, tail latency, flaky or mis-owned tests, quarantine friction, and repeated manual reruns.
• Build agents that help pull requests make forward progress through rebasing, conflict resolution, CI triage, safe reruns, owner routing, and identification of external blockers.
• Make deployment pipelines more self-healing, particularly when transient alerts, known-bad clusters, recovered synthetics, stale release candidates, or noisy gates do not require human intervention.
• Improve deployment observability so engineers can quickly determine where a change is, what is blocking it, whether the signal is trustworthy, and who owns the next action.
• Establish lightweight metrics for impact, including commit-to-production latency, deployment-window throughput, CI tail latency, local bootup time, failure rates, manual interventions, false-positive gates, and developer-reported pain.

Requirements

• Strong experience with large-scale developer infrastructure, build systems, CI/CD, deployment systems, or production reliability.
• Ability to debug across local machines, devboxes, remote caches, monorepos, service dependencies, authentication systems, and distributed deployment pipelines.
• Comfortable working with Bazel, Buildkite, Kubernetes, Temporal, Python, TypeScript services, GitHub workflows, and large monorepo tooling, or able to ramp quickly on equivalent systems.
• Product-oriented systems thinking, with a focus on whether developers can understand and trust workflows in addition to whether subsystems are technically healthy.
• Ability to replace repeated manual intervention with policy-backed automation while preserving production safety.
• Strong cross-team communication skills and the ability to turn ambiguous reports into clear owners, hypotheses, metrics, and shipped fixes.
• Preference for practical measurement while recognizing developer frustration as an early signal of systems problems.
• Interest in high-leverage work where small improvements can save significant engineering time.

Nice to Have

• Experience improving developer experience in a very large monorepo.
• Experience with remote execution, remote caching, hermetic builds, or cache reproducibility.
• Experience designing CI quarantine, test ownership, merge queue, or auto-revert systems.
• Experience with progressive delivery, canary, preview, or stable deployment pipelines; synthetics; alert quality; and deployment-manager workflows.
• Experience building agent-assisted developer workflows, such as automated pull request monitoring, CI triage, or conflict resolution.
• Familiarity with security and access-control constraints involving secrets, internal authentication, VPN or exit-node networking, and local development.

Benefits

• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits in addition to base pay.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health and dependent care expenses and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time.
• 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.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.