Software Engineer, Core Services

OpenAI; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work model (3 days in office)

Job summary

OpenAI in San Francisco, CA is seeking a software engineer for the Core Services team to design and operate backend platforms such as caching systems, workflow orchestration, metadata stores, and file services. You’ll focus on building highly reliable, scalable systems that serve as the backbone of our products.

We’re looking for people who love building infrastructure, enjoy distributed systems challenges, and create well-designed APIs that accelerate development across teams.

Qualifications

• Experience with distributed systems and backend infrastructure.
• Familiarity with caching layers and metadata stores.
• Experience running containerized services in cloud environments and CI/CD workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain shared infrastructure services across core platforms.
• Collaborate with product teams to provide scalable primitives for distributed systems.
• Improve performance, resilience, and scalability of core services powering applications.

Skills

Distributed systems

Caching infrastructure

Metadata storage

Workflow orchestration

CI/CD pipelines

Cloud services

API design

Tools

Redis

FoundationDB

Temporal

Cadence

Job description

About the Team

The Core Services team is responsible for building and managing foundational services. It acts as the bridge between core infrastructure (e.g. compute, storage, networking) and product engineering teams, and enables product teams to move fast, build reliably, and scale efficiently.

About the Role

As a software engineer in the core services team, you will design and operate critical backend platforms such as caching systems, workflow orchestration, metadata stores, and file services. You’ll focus on building highly reliable, scalable, and performant systems that serve as the backbone of our products.

We’re looking for people who are passionate about building infrastructure that empowers product teams, love working on distributed systems challenges, and enjoy creating well-designed APIs and abstractions that accelerate development.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and maintain shared infrastructure services such as caching layers, workflow orchestration (Temporal), metadata stores, and file storage services.
• Collaborate with product teams to provide scalable, reliable primitives that abstract the complexities of distributed systems.
• Improve performance, resilience, and scalability of core services that power customer-facing applications.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience with distributed systems, caching infrastructure (e.g., Redis, Memcached), metadata storage (e.g., FoundationDB), or workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal, Cadence).
• Have experience running containerized services in cloud environments and integrating them into automated build/test/release (CI/CD) workflows.
• Understand trade-offs in consistency models, replication strategies, and performance optimization in multi-region systems.
• Excel at communication and collaboration with cross-functional teams, and are obsessed with delivering customer success.

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.

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

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