Foundations Search Engineer — Fast, Scalable Retrieval

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 380,000 - 555,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer for its Foundations team in San Francisco. This role focuses on building and scaling retrieval systems necessary for interacting with AI models.

Key responsibilities include developing low-latency, high-throughput systems, and collaborating across teams to enhance system performance and reliability. Candidates should have experience in distributed systems and retrieval techniques, offering a unique opportunity in AI innovation.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale retrieval infrastructure across indexing, serving, and query execution.
• Develop low-latency, high-throughput systems for real-time model interaction.
• Partner with research to productionize embedding and retrieval techniques.
• Support dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval pipelines.
• Own system performance, reliability, and observability at scale.
• Collaborate across Pretraining, Inference, and Product teams to integrate retrieval end-to-end.
• Contribute to model-system interfaces for agentic workflows.

Skills

Experience building and scaling distributed systems

Background in search, retrieval, or indexing systems

Familiarity with embedding-based or ML-powered systems

Experience with performance optimization and production reliability

Ability to work across ML and systems boundaries

First-principles thinking in ambiguous problem spaces

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer for its Foundations team in San Francisco. This role focuses on building and scaling retrieval systems necessary for interacting with AI models.

Key responsibilities include developing low-latency, high-throughput systems, and collaborating across teams to enhance system performance and reliability. Candidates should have experience in distributed systems and retrieval techniques, offering a unique opportunity in AI innovation.