Build Systems Engineer - Bazel, CI & Developer Productivity

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is hiring an Engineer focused on accelerating builds and CI for a fast-growing engineering organization. You will evolve Bazel-based workflows, design Starlark rules, and optimize Buildkite pipelines across a polyglot monorepo to speed up development without sacrificing quality.

You will work on remote caching, performance tuning, and tooling that helps engineers reproduce CI behavior, fix failures quickly, and ship more confidently.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including infrastructure or developer tooling.
• Hands-on experience with Bazel, Buck, Pants, Gradle, or similar build systems.
• Experience building or operating CI systems at scale.
• Able to write production software for internal platforms.
• Ability to debug distributed build/CI failures across components.

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.
• Operate and optimize build infrastructure with Docker/Kubernetes and remote caches.
• Instrument CI with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and analytics.
• Collaborate with product, infra, and research teams to remove bottlenecks.
• Apply AI to developer infrastructure to improve speed and reliability.
• Own reliability and participate in on-call rotation.

Skills

Bazel

Build systems

CI at scale

Debug distributed builds

On-call ownership

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

OpenAI is hiring an Engineer focused on accelerating builds and CI for a fast-growing engineering organization. You will evolve Bazel-based workflows, design Starlark rules, and optimize Buildkite pipelines across a polyglot monorepo to speed up development without sacrificing quality.

You will work on remote caching, performance tuning, and tooling that helps engineers reproduce CI behavior, fix failures quickly, and ship more confidently.