Engineering Manager ChatGPT Role in San Francisco

Drewrynewsnetwork; Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Continuous learning opportunities

Mission-driven culture

Job summary

Drewrynewsnetwork is hiring an Engineering Manager for the ChatGPT team in San Francisco. The role involves leading engineering efforts to build and maintain the infrastructure supporting AI applications. Candidates should have strong technical leadership experience, particularly in backend systems, and a commitment to ethical AI practices. This hybrid position offers an opportunity to significantly impact the development of AI solutions and foster a high-performance engineering culture.

Qualifications

• Proven experience managing engineering teams, ideally in AI or tech environments.
• Strong understanding of backend systems and cloud architectures.
• Ability to lead cross-functional teams in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead the ChatGPT infrastructure engineering team.
• Drive technical decisions on scalable AI systems.
• Ensure ethical and secure design practices in AI deployment.

Skills

Technical leadership

Backend systems design

Cross-functional collaboration

Ethical AI design

Real-time moderation

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Experience in AI and backend systems

Tools

Cloud-native technologies

Orchestration frameworks

Job description

Engineering Manager, ChatGPT (San Francisco)

• Leadership role managing ChatGPT infrastructure engineering.
• Emphasis on backend systems, safety, and iteration.
• Requires strong technical and product instincts.
• Based in San Francisco, hybrid work supported.
• High-trust, autonomous engineering culture.

Artificial Intelligence is rewriting how we interact with the world—and at the center of that transformation is ChatGPT, OpenAI’s groundbreaking conversational product used by millions worldwide. Behind every intelligent answer and seamless interaction is a world-class team of engineers responsible for scaling, refining, and delivering one of the most complex AI deployments in existence. OpenAI is now hiring an Engineering Manager for the ChatGPT Core team in San Francisco—a rare opportunity for a technical leader to shape the infrastructure behind a global phenomenon.

This isn’t just about managing day-to-day engineering tasks. It’s about owning the systems that power generative AI, making strategic architectural decisions, and leading a team with deep trust, autonomy, and creative freedom. You’ll partner closely with product managers, researchers, and designers to ship features that people rely on every day—from AI tutors and writing assistants to coding copilots and productivity tools.

The core team’s mandate spans model inference, backend orchestration, safety filters, and real‑time content moderation—all requiring extreme performance, reliability, and ethical design. As the Engineering Manager, your work will scale AI capabilities safely and efficiently across mobile, web, and enterprise platforms.

OpenAI's culture emphasizes mission-driven development, continuous learning, and psychological safety. You’ll work in an environment where high-impact contributions are encouraged, and where engineering excellence is a shared goal. This hybrid-friendly role offers the best of San Francisco’s innovation ecosystem, backed by a team committed to responsible AI deployment at scale.

For those passionate about leading teams at the cutting edge of technology, this role offers a career-defining opportunity. If you’re looking to combine technical depth, people leadership, and global impact—all while guiding the trajectory of AI—you may have found your next chapter at OpenAI.

Building Scalable Infrastructure for Conversational AI at Scale

As the backbone of ChatGPT’s architecture, infrastructure engineering plays a critical role in delivering fast, safe, and highly available AI experiences to millions of users. The Engineering Manager will guide a team focused on building infrastructure that supports massive concurrency, low‑latency inference, and secure handling of user data.

This involves designing highly modular and scalable systems, utilizing modern cloud‑native technologies and orchestration frameworks. Whether deploying new models or managing memory‑efficient pipelines for multi‑turn dialogue, every infrastructure decision must support rapid iteration without compromising on safety or performance.

As OpenAI evolves, the complexity of serving large‑scale AI increases. The Engineering Manager will be responsible for setting technical direction on distributed systems, auto‑scaling APIs, session persistence, and real‑time inference optimizations. You’ll oversee reliability engineering efforts such as failure‑mode testing, observability instrumentation, and operational excellence practices.

In essence, this pillar of the role centers on ownership. You’ll ensure the platform remains flexible enough to integrate future advancements while robust enough to withstand today’s scale and traffic. It’s a constant balancing act—pushing the limits of innovation while maintaining engineering discipline that ensures trustworthiness and uptime.

Architecting Backend Systems That Power AI Safely and Responsibly

The backend systems supporting ChatGPT are more than just compute pipelines—they are the decision engines that determine how AI interacts with the world. In this role, you’ll lead the design and implementation of backend services that perform real‑time moderation, context management, logging, and user safety.

Every decision must balance performance, security, and ethical considerations. Systems must be auditable, permission‑aware, and adaptable to evolving safety research. You’ll work closely with safety researchers to integrate filtering systems that identify bias, harmful output, or hallucination, and iterate on deployment strategies that include guardrails by design.

This means your architecture must accommodate continuous model upgrades, multi‑region deployments, and data privacy regulations. You’ll contribute to cross‑functional incident reviews and partner with security and privacy experts to maintain compliance across borders.

Product sensitivity is key. Every backend component must be built with real‑world usage in mind. Whether it’s throttling request rates for system health, storing conversation history with GDPR compliance, or triggering retraining workflows, these systems must evolve alongside user needs and regulatory frameworks.

Cultivating a High‑Performance, Mission‑Aligned Engineering Culture

Leadership at OpenAI is not about control—it’s about creating environments where great engineers do their best work. As Engineering Manager, your impact extends far beyond technical scope. You’ll be responsible for hiring, mentoring, and enabling a culture where technical rigor, autonomy, and collaboration flourish.

OpenAI’s team operates with a unique blend of independence and shared purpose. Engineers are encouraged to take ownership of end‑to‑end systems, propose new directions, and ask deep technical questions. Your job is to support them—by providing clear goals, removing blockers, and ensuring everyone is aligned with OpenAI’s broader mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.

You’ll lead with empathy and set a tone of psychological safety where experimentation is welcomed and failure is a learning opportunity. Your mentorship will help junior engineers grow into confident system architects, and you’ll encourage a culture of transparent feedback and constant improvement.

At a tactical level, you’ll run sprint planning, foster engineering rituals, and balance long‑term refactoring projects with near‑term delivery needs. Strategically, you’ll align hiring plans, coordinate with execs, and scale the team in a way that supports OpenAI’s vision responsibly.

Driving Rapid Innovation Through Cross‑Functional Collaboration

This role is not confined to engineering silos. At OpenAI, product success is a joint venture among engineering, product, design, research, and safety. The Engineering Manager for ChatGPT Core is expected to thrive in highly collaborative environments and drive the iterative delivery of features that delight users.

You’ll sit at the same table as research scientists exploring new model behaviors and PMs defining user‑facing features. Your role will be to translate those conversations into prioritized backlogs, reliable systems, and delivery timelines. You’ll advocate for engineering constraints while pushing for creative solutions that move fast without breaking things.

The key to success here is balance: balancing innovation with operational readiness, user feedback with architectural feasibility, and feature ambition with ethical constraints. You’ll build systems that allow for fast A/B testing, controlled model rollouts, and real‑time product analytics.

This collaborative DNA enables ChatGPT to evolve at internet speed—shipping features weekly, not quarterly. The team takes pride in tight feedback loops, frequent production releases, and a culture of continuous deployment under strict safeguards.

Scaling AI Product Leadership with Global Impact

ChatGPT isn’t just another product—it’s the face of modern AI for millions of people. This role comes with strategic responsibility to shape how AI interfaces with society. Your decisions will affect how safely, efficiently, and enjoyably people interact with large language models across industries and continents.

OpenAI's leadership sees the Engineering Manager role as foundational to product strategy. You’ll provide input into long‑term roadmap discussions, influence model deployment priorities, and help bridge the gap between research insights and market needs.

From overseeing region‑specific deployment strategies to architecting model caching that supports international latency requirements, the impact of this role is global in scope. Your work will be used by educators, developers, designers, marketers, students, and everyday users—each with different needs and expectations.

Ultimately, this isn’t just about technology—it’s about responsibility. The systems you build will determine how AI shapes public discourse, digital learning, and creative expression. You’ll lead with both pragmatism and foresight, ensuring that innovation doesn’t outpace accountability.

Why OpenAI’s ChatGPT Manager Role is Transformational

Becoming an Engineering Manager at OpenAI, especially for the ChatGPT Core team, is not just a career milestone—it’s a profound opportunity to lead at the bleeding edge of technology while directly shaping how society engages with artificial intelligence. Few roles offer such a unique blend of technical depth, global impact, team‑building, and ethical responsibility.

This position places you in the driver’s seat of the world’s most popular conversational AI system. You’ll manage engineers who are redefining the boundaries of human‑computer interaction. Your decisions will influence not just software architecture but how millions access AI assistance in real life—from students writing essays to doctors exploring research to developers coding in real time.

Leadership at OpenAI isn’t about command and control. It’s about cultivating a high‑integrity, high‑autonomy culture where engineers thrive. You’ll hire and grow top‑tier talent, set clear vision, and foster an environment of psychological safety that encourages experimentation and excellence.

What sets OpenAI apart is its mission‑first culture. The organization exists not to maximize profit, but to ensure that AGI and advanced AI systems benefit all of humanity. This ethos runs through every engineering decision, team conversation, and product launch. As Engineering Manager, you’ll help embed these principles into the systems and teams you guide.

Add to this the vibrant energy of San Francisco—a global epicenter of innovation—and a hybrid‑friendly work environment that supports both collaboration and deep focus, and you have a truly ideal setting for modern leadership in tech.

You’re not just building software—you’re building the future. A future where AI enhances productivity, creativity, and connection on a massive scale. If you have the passion, expertise, and leadership mindset to guide one of the most influential AI engineering teams in the world, OpenAI is ready for you. The future of AI is being written now—and you could be one of its authors.