Senior Staff Software Engineer, Engineering Acceleration | Consumer Devices

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work model

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced engineer for its Consumer Devices team in San Francisco to design and operate CI/CD pipelines and internal platform capabilities across device and cloud software. This senior role emphasizes developer productivity, reliable deployments, and secure, scalable systems.

You will shape the technical foundations, reduce toil, and guide architecture decisions for a growing platform while collaborating with product, systems, release, quality, and infrastructure teams.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• 5+ years shaping developer productivity or CI/CD initiatives.
• Deep, hands-on experience designing and operating robust CI/CD pipelines.
• Proven track record delivering platform features that boost velocity and reliability.
• Experience making architectural decisions for internal platforms.
• Experience aligning decisions with organizational maturity and scale.
• Knowledge of secure software delivery practices (least-privilege, secrets management, auditability).
• Strong empathy for tooling and workflows that create toil.
• Excellent cross-team communication in ambiguous, fast-changing environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate CI/CD systems and deployment pipelines for device and cloud software.
• Lead internal platform capabilities across build, test, deployment, tooling, and automation.
• Make hands-on architectural decisions about platform design and tradeoffs.
• Improve developer productivity by shortening feedback loops.
• Build self-serve workflows that accelerate common engineering tasks.
• Apply AI-native tooling to improve workflows and output quality.
• Implement secure-by-default capabilities including access controls and secrets handling.
• Partner with product, release, quality, and infrastructure teams to drive improvements.
• Define and track metrics for platform health and engineering effectiveness.
• Participate in on-call rotations for the team’s systems.

Skills

CI/CD pipelines

Developer productivity

Internal platform design

Observability & reliability

Security & access controls

Team collaboration

Kubernetes experience

Tools

Terraform

Buildkite

Bazel

PostgreSQL

Cosmos DB

Kafka

Job description

About the Team

At OpenAI | Consumer Devices, you won’t just build products—you’ll help shape the future of how humanity interacts with intelligence. We’re looking for exceptional people who thrive on solving hard problems, move with urgency, and want their work to matter at global scale. Here, you’ll collaborate with some of the most talented minds in research, engineering, and operations to create products that millions (perhaps billions) will come to enjoy and rely on. If you’re motivated by impact, curiosity, and the chance to define what comes next, we’d like to hear from you.

About the Role

The Engineering Acceleration-focused engineer on the Consumer Device Infrastructure team builds the CI/CD systems, developer workflows, and internal platform capabilities that help engineers develop, test, ship, and debug software across device and cloud surfaces.

This is a highly hands-on senior engineering role focused on CI/CD, software build and deployment pipelines, and developer productivity. You will design and build the technical foundations that improve engineering velocity, reduce toil, and increase software quality. You will also make pragmatic architecture and platform decisions based on the organization’s stage, scaling needs, and security requirements.

We’re looking for an engineer with deep experience in developer productivity and CI/CD who enjoys building robust internal platforms, improving day-to-day engineering workflows, and creating secure, reliable systems that other engineers depend on.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will

• Design, build, and operate CI/CD systems and software delivery pipelines for software that runs both on device and in the cloud.
• Lead the design and architecture of internal platform capabilities across build, test, deployment, workflow automation, and developer tooling.
• Make hands-on technical decisions about platform design, abstraction boundaries, and system tradeoffs based on the team’s current stage, scale, and operational needs.
• Improve developer productivity by shortening feedback loops across build, test, debugging, environment setup, and release-adjacent workflows.
• Build self-serve paved-road workflows that reduce manual effort and make common engineering tasks fast, reliable, and easy to adopt.
• Use AI-native tooling and automation to improve engineering workflows, failure triage, and developer output quality.
• Build secure-by-default platform capabilities, including access controls, secrets and credential handling, artifact permissions, auditability, and policy enforcement in software delivery workflows.
• Partner closely with product, systems, release, quality, and infrastructure teams to understand pain points and turn them into durable platform improvements.
• Define and track metrics for platform health and engineering effectiveness, including build times, queue times, failure rates, flaky failures, and deployment lead time.
• Guide engineering teams on pragmatic observability, reliability, and scalability choices for the systems they build.
• Participate in the on-call rotation for the systems owned by the team.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years building developer productivity, CI/CD, internal platform, or engineering systems.
• Have deep experience designing and operating robust CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and software delivery infrastructure for complex products.
• Have a strong track record of personally building platform features and workflow improvements that materially increased engineering velocity, reliability, or developer experience.
• Have experience making architectural decisions for internal platforms, including when to standardize, when to abstract, and when to keep systems simple.
• Have experience adapting technical decisions to the maturity and scaling stage of an organization, balancing speed, reliability, maintainability, and adoption.
• Have working knowledge of secure software delivery practices such as least-privilege access, secrets management, policy enforcement, auditability, or software supply chain hardening.
• Have strong empathy for the tools, workflows, and frustrations that create toil or slow engineering teams down.
• Are comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-changing environments and bringing structure where needed.
• Communicate clearly and work effectively across teams with different priorities, constraints, and technical needs.

Technical Context

At the heart of our infrastructure is a large-scale deployment of CPU/GPU nodes running in Kubernetes clusters across regions. We build secure systems that support software running on device and in the cloud. Core technologies include Terraform, Buildkite, Bazel, Postgres, Cosmos DB, Kafka, and more.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is a powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other legally protected characteristics.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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