Software Engineer, 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’re looking for an experienced software engineer to own production-critical infrastructure end to end. This role is centered on backend / systems engineering, with emphasis on low-level performance, distributed systems, and hands-on operation of critical services at scale. You’ll take ambiguous problems, turn them into concrete plans, ship pragmatic solutions quickly, and improve them through production feedback and iteration.

This is not a general Python backend role. We’re specifically looking for strong systems experience in Rust or C++, especially in performance-sensitive infrastructure. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Key Responsibilities

• Own critical infrastructure across design, implementation, rollout, operation, and iteration.


• Build and operate performant backend systems in Rust or C++ that support core research workflows.


• Design and improve distributed data and serving systems, including tradeoffs around partitioning, replication, consistency, retries, backpressure, and failure isolation.


• Debug real production bottlenecks across latency, throughput, contention, hot spots, and overload behavior.


• Operate business-critical services through on-call, incidents, postmortems, observability, rollout safety, and zero-downtime migrations.


• Improve reliability of services running on Kubernetes, including resource tuning and failure handling.


• Partner closely with engineers and researchers to deliver fast, reliable, useful systems.


• Raise the bar through strong technical judgment, ownership, and follow-through.

Required Qualifications

• A track record of owning operationally critical systems end to end and delivering outcomes in ambiguous environments.


• Strong hands-on experience building performance-sensitive backend systems in Rust or C++.


• Comfort working below typical service abstractions, including concurrency, async execution, memory behavior, serialization, I/O, networking, profiling, and failure analysis.


• Experience designing, building, or operating distributed systems or distributed databases at meaningful scale.


• Preferably, experience with ClickHouse-like systems or infrastructure for analytics, telemetry, logging, search, ingestion, storage, or query execution.


• Hands-on experience operating production-critical systems, including incidents, observability, rollout safety, and recurrence prevention.


• Strong judgment in balancing engineering quality, speed, risk, and business impact.


• A habit of shipping practical first versions and improving them through production feedback.

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.