Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work model

Job summary

A leading AI research organization located in San Francisco is seeking an experienced data infrastructure engineer to design and operate data infrastructure supporting extensive compute fleets. You will manage the lifecycle ownership and ensure high performance, scalability, and security of data access. Candidates should have over 4 years of relevant experience and be comfortable with fast-paced environments. The position offers a hybrid work model and relocation assistance.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in data infrastructure engineering or infrastructure engineering with a strong interest in data.
• Experience in supporting Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Trino, or Iceberg.
• Ability to work through ambiguity and rapid change.

Responsibilities

• Design and build data infrastructure for high-performance and scalability.
• Manage lifecycle ownership: architecture, implementation, production operations.
• Scale and harden big data computing and storage platforms.

Skills

Data infrastructure engineering

Spark

Kafka

Flink

Airflow

Terraform

Distributed systems debugging

Job description

About the Team

Data Platform at OpenAI owns the foundational data stack powering critical product, research, and analytics workflows. We operate some of the largest Spark compute fleets in production; design, and build data lakes and metadata systems on Iceberg and Delta with a vision toward exabyte-scale architecture; run high throughput streaming platforms on Kafka and Flink; provide orchestration with Airflow; and support ML feature engineering tooling such as Chronon. Our mission is to deliver reliable, secure, and efficient data access at scale and accelerate intelligent, AI assisted data workflows.

Join us to build and operate these core platforms that underpin OpenAI products, research, and analytics.

We’re not just scaling infrastructure – we’re redefining how people interact with data. Our vision includes intelligent interfaces and AI-assisted workflows that make working with data faster, more reliable, and more intuitive.

About the Role

This role focuses on building and operating data infrastructure that supports massive compute fleets and storage systems, designed for high performance and scalability. You’ll help design, build, and operate the next generation of data infrastructure at OpenAI. You will scale and harden big data compute and storage platforms, build and support high-throughput streaming systems, build and operate low latency data ingestions, enable secure and governed data access for ML and analytics, and design for reliability and performance at extreme scale.

You will take full lifecycle ownership: architecture, implementation, production operations, and on-call participation.

You’ve supported Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Trino, or Iceberg as platforms. You’re well-versed in infrastructure tooling like Terraform, experienced in debugging large-scale distributed systems, and excited about solving data infrastructure problems in the AI space.

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.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 4+ years in data infrastructure engineering OR

• Have 4+ years in infrastructure engineering with a strong interest in data

• Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable, secure systems

• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change

• Have an intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills, and an equally strong talent for sharing learnings clearly and concisely with others

This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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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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.