Software Engineer, Caching Infrastructure

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced infrastructure engineer to design, scale, and operate a multi-tenant caching platform that powers inference, identity, quota, and product experiences. You will help shape the long-term roadmap while balancing latency, throughput, durability, and cost.

The role requires deep expertise in Redis/Memcached, distributed systems, Kubernetes, and service meshes. You’ll collaborate across infra and product teams to deliver a scalable caching solution for a fast-paced AI

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and scaling distributed systems, focusing on caching, load balancing, or storage.
• Deep experience with Redis or Memcached including clustering and durability configurations.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and service meshes (e.g., Envoy) and autoscaling systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate OpenAI’s multi-tenant caching platform used across various services.
• Define the long-term vision and roadmap for caching as a core infra capability, balancing performance, durability, and cost.
• Collaborate with other infra teams and product teams to ensure our caching platform meets their needs.

Skills

Distributed caching

Redis

Memcached

Networking fundamentals

Latency optimization

Tools

Kubernetes

Envoy

Service meshes

Job description

About the Team

At OpenAI, we’re building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence. We deploy our models through ChatGPT, our APIs, and other cutting-edge products. Behind the scenes, making these systems fast, reliable, and cost-efficient requires world-class infrastructure.

The Caching Infrastructure team is responsible for building a caching layer that powers many critical use cases at OpenAI. We aim to provide a high-availability, multi-tenant cache platform that scales automatically with workload, minimizes tail latency, and supports a diverse range of use cases.

We’re looking for an experienced engineer to help design and scale this critical infrastructure. The ideal candidate has deep experience in distributed caching systems (e.g., Redis, Memcached), networking fundamentals, and Kubernetes-based service orchestration.

In This Role, You Will:

• Design, build, and operate OpenAI’s multi-tenant caching platform used across inference, identity, quota, and product experiences.
• Define the long-term vision and roadmap for caching as a core infra capability, balancing performance, durability, and cost.
• Collaborate with other infra teams (e.g., networking, observability, databases) and product teams to ensure our caching platform meets their needs.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You:

• Have 5+ years of experience building and scaling distributed systems, with a strong focus on caching, load balancing, or storage systems.
• Have deep expertise with Redis, Memcached, or similar solutions, including clustering, durability configurations, client-side connection patterns, and performance tuning.
• Have production experience with Kubernetes, service meshes (e.g., Envoy), and autoscaling systems.
• Think rigorously about latency, reliability, throughput, and cost in designing platform capabilities.
• Thrive in a fast-paced environment and enjoy balancing pragmatic engineering with long-term technical excellence.

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 an extremely 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 applicable legally protected characteristic.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.