Software Engineer, Infrastructure - Analytics Platform

OpenAI; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 385,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI research firm in San Francisco is seeking a staff-level Software Engineer specializing in infrastructure for their Analytics Platform. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in Rust or C++ and a strong background in distributed systems. This role involves owning and developing critical backend performance-sensitive infrastructure. The position offers a hybrid work model and competitive compensation ranging from $230K to $385K plus equity.

Qualifications

• Strong systems experience in Rust or C++.
• Experience operating production-critical systems.
• Ability to design, build, or operate distributed systems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Own critical infrastructure across all phases.
• Build performant backend systems in Rust or C++.
• Design distributed data and serving systems.
• Debug production bottlenecks.
• Improve reliability of services on Kubernetes.
• Partner with engineers and researchers.

Skills

Rust

C++

Distributed systems

Performance-sensitive backend systems

Kubernetes

Concurrency

Async execution

Memory behavior

Job description

Software Engineer, Infrastructure - Analytics Platform

Analytics - San Francisco

About the Team

The Scaling team designs, builds, and operates critical infrastructure that enables research at OpenAI.

Our mission is simple: accelerate the progress of research towards AGI. We do this by building core systems that researchers rely on – ranging from low‑level infrastructure components to research‑facing custom applications. These systems must scale with the increasing complexity and size of our workloads, while remaining reliable and easy to use.

About the Role

We’re looking for a staff‑level software engineer to own production‑critical infrastructure end to end.

This role is centered on backend / systems engineering, with emphasis on low‑level performance, distributed systems, and hands‑on operation of critical services at scale. You’ll take ambiguous problems, turn them into concrete plans, ship pragmatic solutions quickly, and improve them through production feedback and iteration.

This is not a general Python backend role. We’re specifically looking for strong systems experience in Rust or C++, especially in performance‑sensitive infrastructure.

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:

• Own critical infrastructure across design, implementation, rollout, operation, and iteration.
• Build and operate performant backend systems in Rust or C++ that support core research workflows.
• Design and improve distributed data and serving systems, including tradeoffs around partitioning, replication, consistency, retries, backpressure, and failure isolation.
• Debug real production bottlenecks across latency, throughput, contention, hot spots, and overload behavior.
• Operate business‑critical services through on‑call, incidents, postmortems, observability, rollout safety, and zero‑downtime migrations.
• Improve reliability of services running on Kubernetes, including resource tuning and failure handling.
• Partner closely with engineers and researchers to deliver fast, reliable, useful systems.
• Raise the bar through strong technical judgment, ownership, and follow‑through.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• A track record of owning operationally critical systems end to end and delivering outcomes in ambiguous environments.
• Strong hands‑on experience building performance‑sensitive backend systems in Rust or C++.
• Comfort working below typical service abstractions, including concurrency, async execution, memory behavior, serialization, I/O, networking, profiling, and failure analysis.
• Experience designing, building, or operating distributed systems or distributed databases at meaningful scale.
• Preferably, experience with ClickHouse‑like systems or infrastructure for analytics, telemetry, logging, search, ingestion, storage, or query execution.
• Hands‑on experience operating production‑critical systems, including incidents, observability, rollout safety, and recurrence prevention.
• Strong judgment in balancing engineering quality, speed, risk, and business impact.
• A habit of shipping practical first versions and improving them through production feedback.

Compensation

$230K – $385K + offers equity

Equal Opportunity Employer

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.