Software Engineer, Core Network Engineering

Location

San Francisco

Full time

Scaling

• $230K - $342K
• Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non‑exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance‑related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre‑tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 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 (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non‑exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer‑paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at‑will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

The Core Network Engineering team owns the end‑to‑end networking stack that connects OpenAI’s compute infrastructure — spanning global WAN/edge connectivity, data‑center networking, and high‑performance host/xPU networking used for large‑scale training and inference workloads.

This team is responsible for ensuring networking is never the bottleneck to model training efficiency, cluster reliability, or fleet expansion. They design and operate the systems that provide predictable, high‑throughput, low‑latency connectivity across some of the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure.

We’re looking for engineers to help build and operate the networking foundation behind OpenAI’s frontier AI systems.

Depending on your background and area of focus, you may work across host networking, datacenter fabrics, or global WAN infrastructure. The problems span low‑level systems software, distributed infrastructure, protocol readiness, observability, performance engineering, automation, and large‑scale network operations.

You’ll work on systems where microseconds of latency, tail performance, and network reliability directly impact model training efficiency and production serving performance.

This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy operating close to the hardware/software boundary and solving performance‑critical infrastructure problems at massive scale.

• Design, build, and operate networking systems that support large‑scale AI training and inference infrastructure
• Improve performance, reliability, and scalability across host networking, datacenter fabrics, and WAN systems
• Develop automation for provisioning, configuration management, validation, upgrades, and lifecycle management of networking infrastructure
• Build tooling and observability systems for network health, performance analysis, debugging, and automated remediation
• Optimize network performance across technologies such as RDMA, RoCE, Infini Band, Ethernet, and high‑performance GPU interconnects
• Define and operationalize networking protocols, readiness criteria, and continuous validation systems
• Partner closely with compute, storage, hardware, and infrastructure teams to ensure networking scales predictably with fleet growth
• Contribu…