Software Engineer, Developer Productivity

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 490,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is looking for an experienced engineer to join their Engineering Acceleration team in San Francisco. This role involves designing tools and systems to boost developer productivity, enhancing workflows, and ensuring systems reliability through an on-call rotation.

The ideal candidate should have over 5 years in engineering and substantial experience in building tooling for developers, along with empathy for engineering challenges. The position offers a compensation range of $210K – $490K and relocation assistance.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years in building developer tooling.
• Ability to empathize with engineering teams' frustrations.
• Strong desire for learning and sharing knowledge clearly.

Responsibilities

• Drive design and implementation of tools and systems to enhance engineering productivity.
• Collaborate with teams to address their workflows and needs.
• Participate in on-call rotation for system reliability.

Skills

Infrastructure tooling for developers

Empathy in engineering tools

Learning and sharing knowledge

Comfort with ambiguity

Tools

Terraform

Buildkite

Postgres

Cosmos DB

Kafka

Python

FastAPI

Job description

About The Role

The Engineering Acceleration team designs, builds and maintains the foundational systems that engineers use to build ChatGPT and the API. This is a fast‑growing team and you will get a chance to own and define the strategy, vision, and plan for how to increase developer productivity.

In This Role, You Will

• Drive the design, development, and implementation of tools, systems, and processes that accelerate engineering velocity, reduce manual effort, and increase the quality of output.
• Use our latest AI tools to re‑think how we can be the most productive team in the industry.
• Work closely with various teams within OpenAI to understand their workflows, challenges, and needs, and ensure the tools and systems built by the Engineering Acceleration team address these requirements.
• Bring new features and research capabilities to the world by partnering with product engineers to lay the necessary technical foundations.
• Guide and advise product engineering teams on best practices for ensuring observable, scalable systems.
• Like all other teams, we are responsible for the reliability of the systems we build. This includes an on‑call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Have 5+ years of experience in engineering, including 3+ years of experience in infrastructure building tooling for developers.
• Have experience‑driven empathy for the tools, frustrations, and processes that slow engineering teams down and lead to toil or burnout.
• Have a voracious and intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills—and an equally strong talent for sharing learnings clearly and concisely with others.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions. You view changes as an opportunity to add structure and order when necessary.

As technical context: at the heart of our infrastructure is a large‑scale deployment of GPU nodes running in dozens of Kubernetes clusters across regions. Some core technologies we build with include Terraform, Buildkite, Postgres, Cosmos DB, Kafka, Python, and FastAPI.

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

Compensation Range: $210K – $490K

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.