Platform Systems Engineer – AI Training Infra

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer for Platform Systems to design and build distributed systems that provide visibility into large-scale training workloads and operate them reliably at scale.

You will work on failure detection, tracing, and observability to surface bottlenecks and help engineers optimize the training stack. This role sits at the core of our training infrastructure and requires deep systems engineering and debugging skills.

Qualifications

• Experience designing large-scale distributed training systems.
• Proficiency in low-level software and performance optimization.
• Strong debugging, tracing and observability capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Design and build distributed failure detection, tracing, and profiling systems for large-scale AI training jobs.
• Develop tooling to identify slow, faulty, or misbehaving nodes and provide actionable visibility into system behavior.
• Improve observability, reliability, and performance across OpenAI’s training platform.
• Debug and resolve issues in complex, high-throughput distributed systems.
• Collaborate with systems, infrastructure, and research teams to evolve platform capabilities.
• Extend and adapt failure detection systems or tracing systems to support new training paradigms and workloads.

Skills

Distributed systems

Failure detection

Observability

Performance tuning

Low-level software

Networking

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer for Platform Systems to design and build distributed systems that provide visibility into large-scale training workloads and operate them reliably at scale.

You will work on failure detection, tracing, and observability to surface bottlenecks and help engineers optimize the training stack. This role sits at the core of our training infrastructure and requires deep systems engineering and debugging skills.