Software Engineer, Compute - Storage

OpenAI; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an engineer to help build and operate a scalable storage platform powering research and production workloads. You will work on object stores, cross-region data movement, lifecycle management, and a federation layer that unifies multiple backends, with much of the stack running on Kubernetes and services written in Rust.

You will collaborate with researchers and infrastructure teams to support rapidly evolving workloads, improve reliability, and drive operational excellence

Qualifications

• Experience building or operating distributed systems in production.
• Experience with storage infrastructure and object stores.

Responsibilities

• 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 to keep data durable, available, and cost-effective.
• Evolve the federation layer that unifies multiple backend systems.
• Improve performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platform.
• Collaborate with researchers and infrastructure teams to support evolving workloads.

Skills

Distributed systems

Storage infrastructure

Kubernetes

Rust

Data replication

Education

BS in CS or related field

Tools

Rust

Kubernetes

Cloud storage

Cross-region replication

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, dist