Site Reliability Engineer, Frontier Systems Infrastructure

OpenAI

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Research Services 👥 201 employees 📍 San Francisco, CA, US Est. 2015

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with…

Job Overview

We are looking for engineers to operate the next generation of compute clusters that power OpenAI’s frontier research. This role blends distributed systems engineering with hands-on infrastructure work on our largest datacenters. You will scale Kubernetes clusters to massive scale, automate bare-metal bring-up, and build the software layer that hides the complexity of a magnitude of nodes across multiple data centers.

Key Responsibilities

• Spin up and scale large Kubernetes clusters, including automation for provisioning, bootstrapping, and cluster lifecycle management


• Build software abstractions that unify multiple clusters and present a seamless interface to training workloads


• Own node bring-up from bare metal through firmware upgrades, ensuring fast, repeatable deployment at massive scale


• Improve operational metrics such as reducing cluster restart times (e.g., from hours to minutes) and accelerating firmware or OS upgrade cycles


• Integrate networking and hardware health systems to deliver end-to-end reliability across servers, switches, and data center infrastructure


• Develop monitoring and observability systems to detect issues early and keep clusters stable under extreme load


• Execute at the same level as a software engineer

Required Qualifications

• Experience as an infrastructure, systems, or distributed systems engineer in large-scale or high-availability environments


• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes internals, cluster scaling patterns, and containerized workloads


• Proficiency in cloud infrastructure concepts (compute, networking, storage, security) and in automating cluster or data center operations


• Bonus: background with GPU workloads, firmware management, or high-performance computing

About OpenAI

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.

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.