Software Engineer, Productivity - Networking

OpenAI; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 385,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer, Productivity in Los Angeles to enhance the developer experience for networking systems. This role focuses on improving development workflows, designing continuous deployment pipelines, and building test harnesses for complex environments. The ideal candidate has experience with CI/CD, testing infrastructure, and is proficient in C++, Python, and build systems like CMake and Bazel. Compensation ranges from $230K to $385K, dependent on experience.

Qualifications

• Experience with CI/CD, release pipelines, testing infrastructure, or build systems.
• Comfortable moving between C++, Python, and various build systems.
• Motivated by helping engineers improve workflows.

Responsibilities

• Improve development workflows for networking systems.
• Design and enhance continuous deployment and validation pipelines.
• Build and maintain test harnesses for multi-server environments.
• Drive testing and reliability strategy for large-scale workloads.

Skills

CI/CD

Release pipelines

Testing infrastructure

Build systems (CMake, Bazel, Blaze)

C++

Python

Job description

Software Engineer, Productivity – Networking

Runtime – San Francisco

We’re hiring software engineers to make OpenAI’s networking teams more productive. These teams build and operate the high-performance networking systems that support OpenAI’s training and inference infrastructure at frontier scale.

About the Role

We’re looking for someone who cares deeply about the developer experience of engineers working on complex infrastructure systems — especially around build systems, test architecture, release pipelines, and reliable development workflows.

This role will be embedded with OpenAI’s networking team: making it faster, safer, and easier for engineers to build, test, validate, and ship changes across multi-server, networked, and hardware-adjacent environments.

In this role you will:

• Improve development workflows for engineers building and operating OpenAI’s networking systems
• Design and improve continuous deployment, release, and validation pipelines
• Build and maintain test harnesses for multi-server, networked, and hardware-backed environments
• Improve iteration speed across C++, Python, and build-system-heavy codebases
• Partner with engineers to identify friction in CI, testing, debugging, and deployment workflows
• Drive testing and reliability strategy for infrastructure components that support large-scale training and inference workloads
• Work closely with centralized developer experience teams while staying deeply embedded with the networking engineers closest to the systems

You might thrive in this role if:

• You are motivated by helping other engineers move faster and with more confidence
• You have experience with CI/CD, release pipelines, testing infrastructure, or build systems
• You are comfortable moving between C++, Python, and build systems such as CMake, Bazel, or Blaze
• You enjoy building test harnesses, automation, and workflow improvements for complex systems
• You do not need to be a networking expert, but you are excited to learn enough about the domain to make the team meaningfully more effective
• When you see repeated friction — slow builds, flaky tests, brittle release processes, painful debugging, unclear validation — your instinct is to fix the underlying system
• You are pragmatic and know how to balance high standards with forward progress
• You like going end-to-end: understanding the engineers, the workflows, the codebase, and the operational realities behind the system
• You are self-directed and comfortable operating with ambiguity in a high-context infrastructure environment

Compensation

$230K – $385K

OpenAI is 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.