Build Systems Engineer: Bazel, CI & Dev Efficiency

OpenAI; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an engineer to evolve the build and continuous integration systems across a large polyglot monorepo, focusing on Bazel-based builds, Buildkite pipelines, remote caching, and test selection to accelerate engineering velocity while keeping quality high.

You will own the reliability of the systems, participate in an on-call rotation for critical developer infrastructure, and collaborate with product, infrastructure, and research teams to remove bottlenecks and apply AI tools to

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including infrastructure or developer tooling.
• Hands-on experience with Bazel, Buck, Pants, Gradle, or similar build systems; understands hermetic builds, dependency graphs, caching, sandboxing, remote execution.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve Bazel-based build and test workflows across a large monorepo.
• Design and maintain Starlark rules, macros, toolchains, and integrations for reproducible builds.
• Improve CI performance and reliability across Buildkite pipelines.

Skills

5+ years software engineering

Bazel, Build systems

CI/CD tooling

Distributed infra debugging

Tools

Bazel

Buildkite

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an engineer to evolve the build and continuous integration systems across a large polyglot monorepo, focusing on Bazel-based builds, Buildkite pipelines, remote caching, and test selection to accelerate engineering velocity while keeping quality high.

You will own the reliability of the systems, participate in an on-call rotation for critical developer infrastructure, and collaborate with product, infrastructure, and research teams to remove bottlenecks and apply AI tools to