Software Engineer, Platform Systems

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 310,000 - 460,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI research organization is looking for a Software Engineer for their Platform Systems team in San Francisco. You will design and build systems for large-scale AI training workloads, focusing on reliability and performance. Ideal candidates should have a deep understanding of distributed systems, experience in debugging complex systems, and a passion for AI applications. The compensation range is competitive, from $310K to $460K annually.

Qualifications

• Experience in writing low-level software where system details matter.
• Understanding of hardware, operating systems, networking, and concurrency.
• Background in high-performance computing or systems engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design and build distributed failure detection and tracing systems.
• Develop tooling for identifying performance issues in training jobs.
• Collaborate with teams to evolve platform capabilities.

Skills

Performance analysis

Distributed systems

Debugging

Low-level software

Job description

About the Team

The Platform Systems team at OpenAI operates at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and large-scale distributed systems. We build the engineering and research infrastructure required to train OpenAI's flagship models on some of the world's largest, custom-built supercomputers.

Our team develops core model training software and works deep in the stack - spanning collective communication, compute efficiency, parallelism strategies, fault tolerance, failure detection, and observability. The systems we build are foundational to OpenAI's research velocity, enabling reliable, efficient training at frontier scale.

We collaborate closely with researchers across the organization, continuously incorporating learnings from across OpenAI into the evolution of our training platform.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer, Platform Systems, you will design and build distributed systems that provide visibility into large-scale training workloads and help operate them reliably at scale.

You'll work on failure detection, tracing, and observability systems that identify slow or faulty nodes, surface performance bottlenecks, and help engineers understand and optimize massive distributed training jobs. This infrastructure is critical to operating OpenAI's training stack and is actively evolving to support new use cases and increasingly complex workloads.

This role sits at the core of our training infrastructure, blending systems engineering, performance analysis, and large-scale debugging.

In This Role, You Will

• Design and build distributed failure detection, tracing, and profiling systems for large-scale AI training jobs
• Develop tooling to identify slow, faulty, or misbehaving nodes and provide actionable visibility into system behavior
• Improve observability, reliability, and performance across OpenAI's training platform
• Debug and resolve issues in complex, high-throughput distributed systems
• Collaborate with systems, infrastructure, and research teams to evolve platform capabilities
• Extend and adapt failure detection systems or tracing systems to support new training paradigms and workloads

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• Care deeply about performance, stability, and observability in distributed systems
• Enjoy finding and fixing issues in large-scale systems and automating operational workflows
• Have experience writing low-level software where system details matter
• Understand hardware, operating systems, networking, concurrency, and distributed systems
• Have a background in high-performance computing or low-level systems engineering
• Are excited to work on critical infrastructure that powers frontier AI research

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 Affirmative 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.

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

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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 Range: $310K - $460K