Senior Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure Platform

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 220,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking Senior and Staff Engineers to design and build infrastructure systems that underpin ChatGPT and boost engineering velocity at scale.

You will define interfaces, develop core abstractions, and create tooling to enable safe, fast iteration; own outcomes from design to rollout; collaborate with product and engineering teams to reduce frictions and improve reliability and performance.

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Strong fundamentals in systems design, including caching, consistency, queueing/backpressure, and resilient dependency management.
• Ability to reason about performance (latency distributions, tail behavior, bottlenecks) and translate analysis into concrete engineering work.
• Track record of building platforms or shared infrastructure that improves velocity and correctness for other teams.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills—aligning on interfaces, navigating tradeoffs, and driving cross-team execution.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve infrastructure platforms used by many engineers and services.
• Translate real-world constraints into clean abstractions: simple APIs, enforceable contracts, safe defaults.
• Drive improvements in reliability and performance through principled design, measurement, and iterative hardening.
• Partner with engineering and product teams to identify systemic pain points and develop reusable solutions.
• Own outcomes end-to-end: design → implementation → rollout → operational maturity.

Skills

Distributed systems

Systems design

Performance tuning

API design

Cross-team collaboration

Job description

OpenAI is seeking Senior and Staff Engineers to design and build infrastructure systems that underpin ChatGPT and boost engineering velocity at scale.

You will define interfaces, develop core abstractions, and create tooling to enable safe, fast iteration; own outcomes from design to rollout; collaborate with product and engineering teams to reduce frictions and improve reliability and performance.