Software Engineer, Observability

OpenAI; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 255,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI research and deployment company is seeking a Software Engineer specializing in Observability to enhance their core infrastructure and tools. You will manage observability systems, build AI-driven tools for better issue resolution, and collaborate with diverse teams to innovate observability standards at scale. Successful candidates will have strong foundations in distributed systems and cloud technologies, along with a passion for crafting tools that leverage AI responsibly. Excellent compensation and equity offerings are included.

Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale distributed systems in production, preferably logging or time series databases.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguous environments and solve unscoped problems.
• Excitement for building real tools people use.

Responsibilities

• Own core observability infrastructure related to logging, time series, and trace storage.
• Build AI-native tools for issue detection and resolution.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to enhance product observability.

Skills

Distributed systems operation

Ambiguity navigation

Full-stack development

Systems fundamentals

Cloud infrastructure

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Software Engineer, Observability

Applied AI Infrastructure - San Francisco

Join the engineering teams that bring OpenAI’s ideas safely to the world!!

The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.

About the Role

We’re building the observability product for OpenAI—from scalable infrastructure to a rich, AI-powered UI. Our systems ingest over petabytes of logs and billions of time series metrics across our fleet. We're now layering intelligence on top—think agents that summarize SEVs, auto-generate dashboards, or help engineers debug through notebook‑like UIs.

We’re hiring software engineers across the stack—infra, backend, and product. You’ll join a small, gritty team building both foundational infra and novel internal tools to make OpenAI's production systems reliable, performant, and observable.

What You’ll Do

• Own core observability infrastructure, including distributed logging, time series, and trace storage
• Build AI-native tools that help engineers detect, understand, and resolve issues autonomously.
• Contribute to UI experiences like dashboards, notebooking, or interactive debugging
• Collaborate closely with engineers, researchers, user ops, and other teams across the company to build the next generation observability product

You Might Be a Fit If You:

• Have operated large‑scale distributed systems in production. (especially logging systems or some other time series databases)
• Thrive in ambiguous environments and roll up your sleeves to solve unscoped problems.
• Have full‑stack chops or product sensibilities—you're excited to build real tools people use.
• Have strong fundamentals in systems, networking, and cloud infra (Kubernetes, AWS, etc).
• Bonus: built or contributed to observability systems (e.g. Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc).

Why This Team

• We’re both an infra and product team—building a real AI application for internal use.
• Your work will directly power the reliability of GPT‑based products at massive scale.
• You'll help define what "AI‑powered observability" looks like at one of the world’s most advanced AI labs.

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 Affirative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non‑compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

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.

Compensation

$255K – $405K + Offers Equity

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