Senior Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure — Scale

OpenAI, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 266,000 - 445,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) retirement plan with employer-m

Paid parental leave

Flexible PTO

Relocation assistance

Meal programs in offices

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer for Search Infrastructure in San Francisco. You will design, build, and operate systems that connect models with search at scale, tackling latency, throughput, and reliability to improve answer quality and user experience.

The role requires ownership from design through launch, collaboration with researchers and partner teams, and the ability to evolve architecture as models and demand grow.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve the services that coordinate search classification, retrieval, ranking, and model inference, working closely with researchers and partner engineering teams to bring new capabilities into production.
• Improve end‑to‑end latency, throughput, and infrastructure efficiency through profiling, caching, request routing, and capacity planning, making informed tradeoffs between search quality, reliability, and compute cost.
• Build experimentation tooling and automation to run reproducible A/B tests, define success metrics, and measure product impact. Use shadow traffic and load testing to validate system behavior, estimate capacity needs, and support safe production rollouts.
• Own production reliability through observability, resilient fallback behavior, incident response, and automation that improves launch safety and reduces operational toil.
• Build search APIs and tool interfaces that enable models and agents to retrieve information reliably while respecting access controls and preserving source attribution.

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer for Search Infrastructure in San Francisco. You will design, build, and operate systems that connect models with search at scale, tackling latency, throughput, and reliability to improve answer quality and user experience.

The role requires ownership from design through launch, collaboration with researchers and partner teams, and the ability to evolve architecture as models and demand grow.