Software Engineer, Infrastructure - Analytics Platform

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI research company in San Francisco seeks a staff-level software engineer to own critical infrastructure. This role focuses on backend and systems engineering, requiring strong experience in Rust or C++. Responsibilities include designing and operating performant backend systems and improving distributed systems. The position supports a hybrid work model with relocation assistance offered to new employees.

Qualifications

• Track record of owning operationally critical systems end to end.
• Strong hands-on experience building performance-sensitive backend systems.
• Comfortable working below typical service abstractions.

Responsibilities

• Own critical infrastructure across design, implementation, rollout, operation, and iteration.
• Build and operate performant backend systems in Rust or C++.
• Design and improve distributed systems.

Skills

Rust

C++

Distributed Systems

Performance-sensitive Infrastructure

Job description

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, back‑pressure, and failure isolation.
• Debug real production bottlenecks across latency, throughput, contention, hot spots, and overload behavior.
• Operate business‑critical services through on‑call, incidents, post‑mortems, 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 judgement in balancing engineering quality, speed, risk, and business impact.
• A habit of shipping practical first versions and improving them through production feedback.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

We are an equal‑opportunity employer and 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.

OpenAI is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via a dedicated link.