Software Engineer, ChatGPT 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

This is a platform-building role: you’ll define interfaces, develop core abstractions, and create tooling to make safe, fast iteration the norm. Your work will reduce friction, prevent regressions, improve performance, and ensure systems scale gracefully as the product grows.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and evolve infrastructure platforms used by many engineers and services.


• Translate real-world constraints into clean abstractions: simple APIs, enforceable contracts, safe defaults.


• Drive improvements in reliability and performance through principled design, measurement, and iterative hardening.


• Partner with engineering and product teams to identify systemic pain points and develop reusable solutions.


• Own outcomes end-to-end: design → implementation → rollout → operational maturity.

Required Qualifications

• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production (high throughput, concurrency, and failure handling).


• Strong fundamentals in systems design, including caching, consistency, queueing/backpressure, and resilient dependency management.


• Ability to reason about performance (latency distributions, tail behavior, bottlenecks) and translate analysis into concrete engineering work.


• Track record of building platforms or shared infrastructure that improves velocity and correctness for other teams.


• Excellent communication and collaboration skills—aligning on interfaces, navigating tradeoffs, and driving cross-team execution.

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.