Software Engineer, Product Velocity

OpenAI; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced infrastructure engineer to accelerate and stabilize the ChatGPT development and deployment loop. You will own local development, build systems, CI, deployment infrastructure, test ownership, and production safety signals to shorten the path from change to production.

This role requires diagnosing messy distributed systems, translating developer pain into reliable automation, and balancing velocity with safety.

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, 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

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. 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