Software Engineer, Caching 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

At OpenAI, we’re building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence. We deploy our models through ChatGPT, our APIs, and other cutting-edge products. Behind the scenes, making these systems fast, reliable, and cost-efficient requires world-class infrastructure.

The Caching Infrastructure team is responsible for building a caching layer that powers many critical use cases at OpenAI. We aim to provide a high-availability, multi-tenant cache platform that scales automatically with workload, minimizes tail latency, and supports a diverse range of use cases.

We’re looking for an experienced engineer to help design and scale this critical infrastructure. The ideal candidate has deep experience in distributed caching systems (e.g., Redis, Memcached), networking fundamentals, and Kubernetes-based service orchestration.

In This Role, You Will

• Design, build, and operate OpenAI’s multi-tenant caching platform used across inference, identity, quota, and product experiences.


• Define the long-term vision and roadmap for caching as a core infra capability, balancing performance, durability, and cost.


• Collaborate with other infra teams (e.g., networking, observability, databases) and product teams to ensure our caching platform meets their needs.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Have 5+ years of experience building and scaling distributed systems, with a strong focus on caching, load balancing, or storage systems.


• Have deep expertise with Redis, Memcached, or similar solutions, including clustering, durability configurations, client-side connection patterns, and performance tuning.


• Have production experience with Kubernetes, service meshes (e.g., Envoy), and autoscaling systems.


• Think rigorously about latency, reliability, throughput, and cost in designing platform capabilities.


• Thrive in a fast-paced environment and enjoy balancing pragmatic engineering with long-term technical excellence.

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. 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 characteristic.

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.