Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

Details

The Search Product Infrastructure team builds the systems that power search experiences across ChatGPT. The team partners with model development, inference infrastructure, specialized search experiences, and search index teams to bring advances in models and retrieval into production. Its work spans search orchestration, model serving, experimentation, and distributed systems, with direct impact on answer quality, responsiveness, reliability, and efficiency at ChatGPT scale.

As a senior engineer, you will design, build, and operate systems that connect models with search at ChatGPT scale. You will work on search orchestration, inference efficiency, experimentation, and production reliability, owning projects from technical design through launch and iteration.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve services that coordinate search classification, retrieval, ranking, and model inference.
• Work with researchers and partner engineering teams to bring new capabilities into production.
• Improve end-to-end latency, throughput, and infrastructure efficiency through profiling, caching, request routing, and capacity planning.
• Balance search quality, reliability, and compute cost.
• Build experimentation tooling and automation for reproducible A/B tests.
• Define success metrics and measure product impact.
• Use shadow traffic and load testing to validate system behavior, estimate capacity needs, and support safe production rollouts.
• Own production reliability through observability, resilient fallback behavior, incident response, and automation that improves launch safety and reduces operational toil.
• Build search APIs and tool interfaces that enable models and agents to retrieve information reliably while respecting access controls and preserving source attribution.

Requirements

• Significant experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with depth in performance, reliability, or resource efficiency.
• Experience in one or more of search, information retrieval, ML infrastructure, inference serving, or other high-throughput online systems.
• Strong programming and systems debugging skills.
• Ability to work across languages and unfamiliar parts of a production stack.
• Ability to turn ambiguous product or research needs into clear technical plans, align partners across teams, and carry projects through deployment and measurable results.
• Interest in learning across systems and machine learning, investigating unfamiliar problems, and clearly sharing technical decisions and lessons.

Compensation And Benefits

• Base salary: $266,000–$445,000 per year.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, 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 as applicable.
• 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.

The role is based in San Francisco, California, and uses a hybrid work model with three days in the office per week. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.