Software Engineer, Compute - Storage

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

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Storage Infrastructure Engineer to build and operate the storage platform powering research and production workloads. You will own projects across object storage, cross-region data movement, and data lifecycle management, with much of the stack running on Kubernetes and Rust.

You will collaborate with researchers and infrastructure teams to ensure durability, availability, and cost efficiency while advancing performance and reliability across the platform.

Qualifications

• Experience building or operating distributed storage systems in production.
• Strong background in storage infrastructure, object stores or data-heavy backends.
• Proven ability to own infrastructure end to end, with debugging and reliability focus.
• Production code experience in Rust or similar systems language.
• Comfort working with Kubernetes and related tooling.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate storage services underpinning OpenAI’s research infrastructure.
• Develop object storage systems across cloud and in-house environments.
• Create systems for cross-region data movement, replication and recovery.
• Design lifecycle management to keep data durable, available, and cost-effective.
• Evolve the federation layer unifying multiple backends behind a single interface.
• Improve performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platform.
• Collaborate with researchers and infrastructure teams to support evolving workloads.

Skills

Distributed systems

Storage infrastructure

Object storage

Kubernetes

Rust

Observability tooling

Terraform

Grafana

Tools

Terraform

Grafana

Job description

About the Team

The Storage Infrastructure team builds and operates the storage foundation behind OpenAI’s most demanding workloads. We work directly with research to design storage systems for rapidly evolving experiments, while also powering production at scale. We own the platform end to end: backend systems, user-facing services and APIs, and the control planes that manage how data is placed, moved, and retained over time.

Our stack spans cloud and in-house object stores across very different workload profiles, from GPU-attached systems to dedicated storage hardware. We also build the federation layer that unifies these backends behind a simple interface and routes each workload to the right storage solution.

About the Role

You will help build the storage platform that powers OpenAI’s research and production systems. This is a hands-on infrastructure role for engineers who want to work on deeply technical systems at scale and own them in production.

You’ll work across object storage, cross-region data movement, lifecycle management, and the federation layer that provides a unified interface across multiple backends. Much of our stack runs on Kubernetes, and we primarily build services in Rust.

In this role, you will:

• Build and operate storage services that underpin OpenAI’s research infrastructure

• Develop object storage systems across cloud and in-house environments

• Build systems for cross-region data movement, replication, and recovery

• Design lifecycle management capabilities that keep data durable, available, and cost-effective

• Evolve the federation layer that unifies multiple backend systems behind a simple interface

• Improve performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platform

• Collaborate closely with researchers and infrastructure teams to support rapidly evolving workloads

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience building or operating distributed systems in production

• Have worked on storage infrastructure, object stores, distributed filesystems, or other data-intensive backend systems

• Enjoy owning infrastructure end to end, including debugging and long-term reliability improvements

• Write strong production code, ideally in Rust or another systems-oriented language

• Are comfortable working with Kubernetes-based systems

• Have experience with tools such as Terraform, Grafana, or similar infrastructure and observability tooling

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.

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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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