Software Engineer, Traffic Infrastructure

📋 Job Overview

You’ll build and operate the networking and traffic infrastructure that connects OpenAI’s products and services across clouds and regions. The team’s work spans L3, L4, and L7—from IP connectivity, NAT, and transport behavior to service proxies and application request routing. This role combines software engineering with production ownership, turning ambiguous networking problems into durable improvements.

🏢 About OpenAI

OpenAI is a research laboratory that focuses on artificial intelligence. The Cloud Infrastructure team builds and operates the infrastructure behind OpenAI’s products, including ChatGPT and the API. Within Cloud Infrastructure, the Traffic team owns how traffic enters our cloud environments, moves between services, clusters, and regions, and reaches external dependencies.

🎯 The Role

You’ll build and operate the networking and traffic infrastructure that connects OpenAI’s products and services across clouds and regions. The team’s work spans L3, L4, and L7—from IP connectivity, NAT, and transport behavior to service proxies and application request routing. You’ll bring depth in part of this stack and curiosity about how the whole path works.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate ingress, egress, and service-to-service connectivity across clusters, regions, and clouds.
• Develop proxies, gateways, controllers, and automation for routing, load balancing, failover, and traffic management.
• Build and evolve cloud networking infrastructure, including private connectivity, NAT, and network isolation.
• Diagnose failures and performance bottlenecks across application, proxy, transport, and cloud networking layers; work with cloud providers when issues extend into their infrastructure.
• Build telemetry and diagnostic tools that explain traffic paths, identify failing components, and help engineers take effective action.
• Partner with Security to implement and validate traffic-path protections, including secure service communication, access controls, egress restrictions, and DDoS defenses.
• Improve latency, throughput, availability, and network efficiency through measurement, testing, and careful production rollouts.
• Create clear interfaces and safe defaults for service teams, participate in on-call, and turn operational lessons into changes that prevent recurring failures and reduce manual work.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Have 5+ years of experience building production infrastructure or distributed systems, including substantial work on networking or traffic infrastructure.
• Have depth in one or more areas such as cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, proxies and gateways, service meshes, load balancing, or global traffic routing.
• Understand networking fundamentals and can reason about how IP routing, TCP/UDP, DNS, NAT, TLS, and HTTP/gRPC affect connectivity and performance.
• Have hands-on experience building or operating systems such as Envoy, NGINX, Istio, Cilium, or comparable networking infrastructure.
• Write production software in Go, Rust, C++, Python, or a similar language, and use software and automation to solve operational problems.
• Can investigate unfamiliar failures using evidence, test hypotheses, and follow problems through to a verified resolution.
• Take ownership of design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing reliability, and communicate clearly across teams when a problem crosses ownership boundaries.
• Care about making infrastructure secure and understandable for the engineers who depend on it.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• We value deep expertise and the willingness to learn across boundaries. You do not need prior experience with every technology or networking layer listed above.

🎁 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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.