Software Engineer, Foundations Search

Slope; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 380,000 - 555,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) retirement plan with employer match

Paid parental leave

Flexible PTO

Mental health and wellness support

Annual learning and development stipend

Daily meals in offices

Job summary

Slope is seeking a Software Engineer in San Francisco to build and scale retrieval systems across indexing, serving, and query execution.

This role focuses on developing infrastructure for real-time model interaction, ensuring system performance and reliability. The compensation package ranges from $380K to $555K along with significant equity and benefits.

Join a team that is advancing AI capabilities while fostering an inclusive environment.

Qualifications

• Experience in building and scaling distributed systems.
• Familiarity with performance optimization and reliability.
• Ability to work across machine learning and systems boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale retrieval infrastructure across indexing and serving.
• Develop low-latency, high-throughput systems for real-time model interaction.
• Own system performance, reliability, and observability at scale.

Skills

Building and scaling distributed systems

Search, retrieval, or indexing systems

Embedding-based or ML-powered systems

Performance optimization and production reliability

Job description

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Research

Compensation

• $380K – $555K • Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non‑exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance‑related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre‑tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non‑birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non‑exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer‑paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at‑will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

About the Team

The Foundations Research team works on high‑risk, high‑reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models. Pushing the boundaries of data, scaling laws, optimization techniques, model architectures, and efficiency improvements to propel our science.

The Search team sits within Foundations, building agentic search by co‑designing model–system interfaces with the core search stack (serving, indexing, retrieval) to translate model intent into reliable, real‑world actions. Operating at the frontier of AI and information retrieval, the team develops large‑scale systems that transform and index vast corpora, enabling models to reason over global knowledge and act dependably. In close partnership with researchers, we rapidly bring modeling breakthroughs into production and redefine how intelligent systems discover, retrieve, and synthesize information at planetary scale.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Software Engineer focused on building and scaling retrieval systems. You’ll work with a team of researchers and engineers to develop infrastructure that enables models to retrieve and act on the right information at the right time. This includes designing and operating indexing systems, retrieval pipelines, and serving layers.

This work supports retrieval across OpenAI products and research, with direct impact on system performance, reliability, and scale.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale retrieval infrastructure across indexing, serving, and query execution.
• Develop low‑latency, high‑throughput systems for real‑time model interaction.
• Partner with research to productionize embedding and retrieval techniques.
• Support dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval pipelines.
• Own system performance, reliability, and observability at scale.
• Collaborate across Pretraining, Inference, and Product teams to integrate retrieval end‑to‑end.
• Contribute to model‑system interfaces for agentic workflows.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have

• Experience building and scaling distributed systems.
• Background in search, retrieval, or indexing systems.
• Familiarity with embedding‑based or ML‑powered systems.
• Experience with performance optimization and production reliability.
• Ability to work across ML and systems boundaries.
• First‑principles thinking in ambiguous problem spaces.

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.

Compensation Range: $380K - $555K