Software Engineer, Product Velocity

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 347,000 - 445,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced infrastructure engineer to accelerate ChatGPT development by making the end-to-end developer and deploy loop faster and more reliable. You will own local startup latency, build performance, CI reliability, and deploy observability across Bazel, Buildkite, Kubernetes, and monorepo tooling.

Ideal candidates diagnose messy distributed systems, interpret signals from Slack and metrics, and build automation that preserves production safety while boosting velocity.

Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale developer infrastructure and build systems.
• Ability to debug across distributed deploy pipelines and local/remote environments.
• Translate developer pain signals into reliable tooling with measurable impact.
• Comfort working in a very large monorepo with modern tooling (Bazel/CI).

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 flaky tests and long tails.
• Build agents that help PRs progress: rebasing, conflict resolution, CI triage, safe reruns.

Skills

Large-scale infra

CI/CD

Distributed systems

Observability tooling

Tools

Bazel

Buildkite

Kubernetes

Temporal

Python/TypeScript

GitHub Actions

Job description

About The Team

The 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.

About The Team

The 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 Role

We 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.
• Experience building agent-assisted developer workflows, such as automated PR babysitting, CI triage, or conflict resolution.
• Familiarity with security and access-control constraints around secrets, internal auth, VPN/exit-node networking, and local development.

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 Affinity 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 Range: $347K - $445K