Software Engineer, Infrastructure OpenAI San Francisco

About the Team

We’re hiring Software Engineers to join our broader Infrastructure organization, which supports multiple high-impact teams. Depending on your interests and experience, you could work on one of several focus areas—including Core Distributed Systems, Reliability Engineering, Observability, Developer Productivity or Cloud Infrastructure.

All teams are deeply collaborative, work on mission‑critical services, and are responsible for building distributed, scalable infrastructure to bring OpenAI’s technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. You’ll work closely with stakeholders to understand infrastructure, data and compute needs, setting the technical strategy that supports cutting‑edge research and product development. This is a critical role for someone who is passionate about solving complex engineering problems at scale, ensuring their performance, scalability and reliability

• Distributed Systems: Owning and building important, highly scalable, available, performant, and reliable distributed systems (and their building blocks) to power the entire stack at OpenAI

• Systems Engineering: Work across layers of the stack—debugging system bottlenecks, evolving core infrastructure, and solving novel problems in performance and scalability.

• Reliability Engineering: Build scalable, fault-tolerant systems and lead efforts around service health, incident response, and resilience.

• Observability: Design and maintain observability tooling (metrics, logs, tracing) to give teams visibility into production systems at scale.

• Developer Productivity: Create tools, environments, and workflows that help engineers ship high-quality software faster and more safely.

• Cloud Infrastructure: Own the cloud-native infrastructure (compute, networking, storage) that underpins all services and research workloads.

• Databases: Building high performance, distributed database systems that power all of OpenAI's product stack.

• Design, build, and maintain reliable and performant systems used across engineering.
  Work with your team to define technical strategy, architecture, and long-term goals.

• Collaborate with other engineers, product managers, and researchers to build infrastructure that meets evolving needs.

• Improve internal tooling, automation, and developer experience.

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

• Strong software engineering skills with experience in Python, Go, C++, Rust, or similar languages.

• Experience designing, operating, or scaling distributed systems or developer infrastructure.

• Comfort working in Linux environments, and with tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks.

• Ability to navigate complex systems and a willingness to dig deep when debugging tricky issues.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, especially in cross-functional settings.

• 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.

• Excellent communication skills, with ability to build consensus among stakeholders both internally and externally.

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected…