Build & CI Systems Engineer — Fast, Reliable Software

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an engineer to evolve consumer products build and continuous integration systems. The role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, build systems, distributed infrastructure, software quality, and on‑device software.

You will work on Bazel‑based builds, Buildkite pipelines, and tooling that helps engineers ship rapidly and confidently. Based in San Francisco with a hybrid model (four days in the office per week) and relocation assistance for new hires, this role

Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering experience building infrastructure and tooling.
• Hands-on experience with Bazel, Buck, Gradle, or similar build systems.
• Experience building CI systems at scale, reducing build times and improving reliability.
• Comfort with owning production software and operating in SLA-driven environments.
• Ability to debug distributed build and CI failures across multiple layers.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve Bazel- and Yocto-based build and test workflows in a polyrepo environment.
• Design and maintain Starlark rules, macros, toolchains, and integrations for hermetic builds.
• Improve CI performance and reliability across Buildkite pipelines, queue time, and cache hits.
• Build systems to reduce unnecessary CI work through target detection, dependency analysis, and smarter scheduling.
• Unify local and CI development workflows so engineers can reproduce CI behavior.
• Operate and optimize build infra across Docker/OCI, Kubernetes runners, and remote cache/execution systems.
• Instrument systems with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and analytics to measure speed and reliability.
• Collaborate with users to understand pain points and remove bottlenecks.
• Apply AI tools to developer infrastructure to increase velocity without compromising quality.

Skills

Engineering experience

Tools

Bazel

Buck

Gradle

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an engineer to evolve consumer products build and continuous integration systems. The role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, build systems, distributed infrastructure, software quality, and on‑device software.

You will work on Bazel‑based builds, Buildkite pipelines, and tooling that helps engineers ship rapidly and confidently. Based in San Francisco with a hybrid model (four days in the office per week) and relocation assistance for new hires, this role