Software Engineer, Product Velocity

We Love AI Jobs; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 347,000 - 445,000; Full time

Job summary

We Love AI Jobs is seeking an experienced Software Engineer to join the OpenAI San Francisco velocity team in a hybrid role. You will improve local development, build systems, CI, deployment pipelines, and production signals to reduce delays and manual intervention.

The role requires hands-on expertise with Bazel, Buildkite, Kubernetes, Temporal, Python and TypeScript services, and a bias for shipping reliable systems that engineers trust.

Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale developer infrastructure and CI/CD systems.
• Ability to debug across local machines, devboxes, and monorepos.
• Proven track record of improving build performance and reliability.
• Strong collaboration and ownership of end-to-end improvements.

Responsibilities

• Reduce local development startup and iteration latency for ChatGPT engineers.
• Improve Bazel and build performance for local machines, devboxes, and CI, including cache effectiveness and observability.
• Improve CI reliability and merge throughput by reducing unrelated failures and flaky tests.
• Build agents that help PRs make forward progress: rebasing, conflict resolution, CI triage, safe reruns.
• Make deploy pipelines more self-healing and resilient to transient issues.
• Improve deploy observability to quickly identify blockers and owners.
• Establish lightweight metrics for before-and-after impact: latency, throughput, and failure rates.

Tools

Bazel

Buildkite

Kubernetes

Temporal

Python

TypeScript

GitHub workflows

CI/CD

Job description

# Software Engineer, Product VelocityOpenAISan Francisco (Hybrid)Full-time$347,000 – $445,000 / yearUpload your resume once and Scout applies for youApply with ScoutShare this job:LinkedInXSave imageThis infrastructure role improves the development and deployment workflow used by engineers building ChatGPT-facing services. You will work across local development, build systems, CI, deploy pipelines, and production signals to reduce delays and manual intervention.* Permanent* Hybrid* Experienced### Skills and expertiseBazelBuildkiteKubernetesTemporalPythonTypeScriptGitHub workflowsCI/CD### Key responsibilities* Improve local development, build, and CI performance and reliability for ChatGPT engineers.* Automate PR and deployment workflows while preserving production safety.* Measure developer workflow health and use the results to prioritize improvements.## How this job comparesCompared with 362 open mid-level infrastructure jobs on October 10, 2026.Pay: This job pays $347K to $445K a year. The 96 open mid-level infrastructure jobs that publish US pay start at $170K on average, so this job starts about 104% higher.Similar open jobs: We Love AI Jobs lists 362 open mid-level infrastructure jobs at 144 companies.Remote work: This job is hybrid. 57 of the 362 mid-level infrastructure jobs (16%) are remote.AI in this role: Low. The company works with AI, but AI is a small part of this role's daily work. The role supports the infrastructure and delivery workflows behind ChatGPT, rather than building or evaluating AI models. Agent-assisted workflows are mentioned as a nice-to-have, not the core responsibility.## Full descriptionAbout the TeamThe ChatGPT Velocity team owns the health of the end-to-end developer and deploy loop for ChatGPT-facing services. Our mission is to help ChatGPT engineers ship confidently with a fast, lightweight development cycle and a trusted path to production.ChatGPT development depends on a long chain: local environments, Bazel builds, CI, tests, merges, release candidates, deploys, synthetics, alerts, and production health. When any link is slow, flaky, or unclear, engineers lose hours, fixes reach users later, and on-call load rises. This team turns that cross-cutting drag into owned, measured, and durable improvements.About the RoleWe are hiring an experienced infrastructure engineer to make ChatGPT development dramatically faster and more reliable. You will work across local development, build systems, CI, deployment infrastructure, test ownership, and production safety signals to reduce the time and attention required to move a healthy change from development to production.This is not a narrow tooling role. The best person for this job will be comfortable diagnosing messy distributed systems, reading developer pain signals from Slack and metrics, building reliable automation, negotiating ownership across teams, and making tradeoffs between velocity and production safety. You should enjoy treating engineers as users and turning confusing workflow failures into clear, measured systems.In this role, you will:• Reduce local development startup and iteration latency for ChatGPT engineers• Improve Bazel and build performance for local machines, devboxes, and CI, including cache effectiveness, reproducibility, disk usage, remote cache behavior, and observability into invalidations.• Improve CI reliability and merge throughput by reducing unrelated failures, tail latency, flaky or mis-owned tests, quarantine friction, and repeated manual reruns.• Build agents that help PRs make forward progress: rebasing, conflict resolution, CI triage, safe reruns, owner routing, and clear identification of external blockers.• Make deploy pipelines more self-healing, especially when transient alerts, known-bad clusters, recovered synthetics, stale RCs, or noisy gates should not require human babysitting.• Improve deploy observability so engineers can quickly tell where a change is, what is blocking it, whether the signal is trustworthy, and who owns the next action.• Establish lightweight metrics for before-and-after impact, such as commit-to-prod latency, deploy-window throughput, CI tail latency, local bootup time, failure rates, manual interventions, false-positive gates, and developer-reported pain.You might thrive in this role if you:• Have strong experience with large-scale developer infrastructure, build systems, CI/CD, deployment systems, or production reliability.• Can debug across local machines, devboxes, remote caches, monorepos, service dependencies, auth systems, and distributed deploy pipelines.• Are comfortable with systems like Bazel, Buildkite, Kubernetes, Temporal, Python/TypeScript services, GitHub workflows, and large monorepo tooling, or can ramp quickly on equivalents.• Think in product loops as much as systems loops: you care whether developers can understand and trust the workflow, not just whether a subsystem is technically healthy.• Know how to replace repeated manual intervention with policy-backed automation while preserving production safety.• Communicate well across teams and can turn ambiguous \"this is slow/broken/flaky\" reports into crisp owners, hypotheses, metrics, and shipped fixes.• Prefer practical measurement over vibes, while still knowing that developer frustration is often the first signal of a real systems problem.• Are energized by high-leverage work where a small improvement can save hundreds of engineering hours.Nice to have:• Experience improving developer experience in a very large monorepo.• Experience with remote execution, remote caching, hermetic builds, or cache reproducibility.• Experience designing CI quarantine, test ownership, merge queue, or auto-revert systems.• Experience with progressive delivery, canary/preview/stable deploy pipelines, synthetics, alert quality, and deploy-manager style workflows.