Senior Support Engineer at OpenAI - SRE Career Growth

OpenAI, Inc.; Toronto; Remote; CAD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity potential

Job summary

OpenAI in Toronto is seeking a Senior Support Engineer to collaborate directly with strategic enterprise accounts and product teams, solving the most difficult technical problems. You will be the last line of defense before the core Engineering group and help scale our support operations through automation and advanced observability.

This Toronto-based role is currently remote but will transition to an in‑office arrangement.

Qualifications

• ,
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field is required.
• 8+ years in technical operations roles (SRE/NOC) with a strong track record in troubleshooting complex issues at the systems level.
• Proficient in observability practices, metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting.
• Experience leading incident responses for high-severity outages and cross-team coordination.

Responsibilities

• Be among the foremost technical experts for our API platform and act as the last line of defense before Engineering.
• Proactively scale support operations using automation and AI-driven tooling.
• Configure and use advanced monitoring and alerting to detect customer-impacting issues in real time.
• Partner with engineering to ensure reliability reviews and readiness for new features.
• Design and refine incident response processes and cross-team documentation.
• Analyze metrics and RCAs to drive improvements in monitoring and workflows.
• Provide support coverage during holidays and weekends based on business needs.

Skills

Observability

SRE/NOC

Incident response

Python scripting

Cloud infrastructure

Distributed systems

Automation

Cross-functional communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

SLIs/SLOs monitoring

Distributed tracing

Logging/observability tooling

Automation tooling

Job description

This is a high-prestige, high-impact senior technical role at one of the most prominent AI companies in the world. Working as the "last line of defense before the core Engineering team" signals genuine technical authority and visibility with executive-level enterprise customers.

Compensation:

No salary is disclosed, but Senior Support Engineer / SRE-equivalent roles at tier-1 AI companies in Toronto typically range from CAD $130,000–$190,000 annually, with equity potentiall y adding significant upside at OpenAI's valuation. The lack of disclosed pay is a minor yellow flag for transparency.

• Advanced observability engineering (SLIs/SLOs, distributed tracing) — extremely marketable in 2024–2025
• AI platform operations and enterprise API support — a niche with growing demand
• Incident command and cross-functional leadership at scale
• Automation and AI-augmented support tooling

Green flags:

"Automation-first mindset," direct collaboration with Engineering, and working on cutting-edge AI infrastructure are strong career accelerators. The role bridges SRE and customer-facing technical leadership — a rare hybrid.

Red flags:

Holiday and weekend coverage requirements suggest potential work-life balance strain. The in-office transition removes remote flexibility. At 8+ years experience required, this is a senior role but the title "Support Engineer" may underrepresent the seniority to external recruiters — worth clarifying during negotiation.

Overall, strong career move for SREs or technical ops leaders who want to be at the frontier of AI deployment.

About the Team

The Technical Support team is responsible for ensuring that developers and enterprises can reliably build mission critical solutions using OpenAI models. We provide technical guidance, resolve complex issues, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our highly-capable models. We work closely with Technical Success, Product, Engineering, and others to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. We think from an automation-first mindset and leverage the latest in AI to scale our support operations. Join the Senior Support Engineering (SSE) team at OpenAI and help shape the future of Technical Support in the age of AI.

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Support Engineer to collaborate directly with our strategic enterprise accounts and product teams, helping solve some of the most difficult problems faced by our customers. You will be part of the best technical troubleshooting team at OpenAI, and our customers and Engineering teams will look to you for technical guidance in addressing the most technically difficult issues in our environment.

As a Senior Support Engineer, you will design and run operational processes to monitor our top strategic customers and a 24x7 response team. You'll work closely with our Infrastructure and Engineering teams to deliver the best possible experience to customers at scale. Working directly with our most strategic customers, you will be crucial to the success of the most innovative, disruptive, and high-scale AI solutions being built with the OpenAI API platform.

The nature of this role will be low volume, high difficulty.

This Toronto-based role is currently remote and is expected to transition to an in-office arrangement.

In this role, you will:

• Be among the foremost technical and troubleshooting experts for our API platform at OpenAI — the last line of defense before the core Engineering team.
• Proactively identify and implement opportunities to scale support operations by leveraging automation and advancements in AI technologies. Contribute to shaping the future of technical support in an AI-driven era.
• Configure and use advanced monitoring and alerting workflows to proactively detect customer-impacting issues in real time.
• In partnership with engineering, contribute to reliability reviews and preparedness for new features, launches, or strategic customer requirement updates. Ensure that operational readiness (monitoring, alerting, and fallback plans) is in place for any such changes.
• Design and refine incident response processes and documentation across strategic customers, engineering, and support teams.
• Analyze operational metrics and incident RCAs to identify areas for improvement. Proactively recommend and implement enhancements to monitoring dashboards, alert configurations, and support workflows.
• Provide support coverage during holidays and weekends based on business needs.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field. A strong software engineering foundation is important for this role's success.
• Have 8+ years of experience in technical operations roles such as SRE/NOC, designing monitoring systems and resolving production issues in fast-paced and mission-critical environments, with a strong track record of troubleshooting complex technical problems at the systems level.
• Have deep familiarity with modern monitoring, alerting, and observability practices. Hands-on experience setting up or managing metrics, logging, and tracing for distributed systems (e.g., understanding of SLIs/SLOs, alert tuning, dashboard creation).
• Have proven experience leading incident response for high-severity outages or service disruptions — able to perform real-time incident coordination, root cause analysis, and drive follow-ups (post-mortems, action items) to prevent recurrence.
• Have strong skills in scripting or software engineering (e.g., Python or similar) to automate repetitive tasks and integrate tools.
• Have a solid understanding of cloud infrastructure and distributed systems fundamentals. Comfortable working with cloud services, load balancers, databases, and containerized applications.
• Are effective at working cross-functionally in a high-trust environment, with strong communication skills to explain technical issues and resolutions to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders.

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 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.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Is this OpenAI Senior Support Engineer role fully remote? The role is currently remote but is explicitly expected to transition to an in-office arrangement in Toronto, Canada. Candidates should be prepared to eventually work on-site. What level of experience is required for this position? OpenAI requires 8+ years of experience in technical operations roles such as SRE or NOC, along with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field and a strong software engineering foundation. Will I need to work weekends or holidays in this role? Yes, the job description explicitly states that support coverage during holidays and weekends will be required based on business needs, as the team operates a 24x7 response function. What is the nature of the support work — high volume or specialized? OpenAI describes this role as "low volume, high difficulty," meaning you'll handle fewer but significantly more complex technical issues for strategic enterprise customers. What technical skills are most important for this role? Key skills include observability and monitoring (SLIs/SLOs, distributed tracing), incident response leadership, Python or similar scripting, cloud infrastructure knowledge, and experience with containerized/distributed systems.

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