Storage Systems Engineer - Rust & Kubernetes

OpenAI; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an engineer to help build the storage platform powering both research and production systems. This hands‑on role focuses on scalable, production‑grade storage infrastructure and deep ownership over end‑to‑end systems.

You’ll work on object storage, cross‑region data movement, lifecycle management, and a federation layer across multiple backends, with much of the stack in Kubernetes and services written in Rust.

Qualifications

• Experience building or operating distributed systems in production.
• Proficiency with Rust or another systems-oriented language.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes-based environments and tooling.
• Experience with infrastructure and observability tooling (Grafana, Terraform).

Responsibilities

• Build and operate storage services that underpin research infrastructure.
• Develop object storage systems across cloud and in-house environments.
• Build systems for cross-region data movement, replication, and recovery.
• Design lifecycle management to keep data durable, available, and cost‑effective.
• Evolve federation layers that unify multiple backends behind a simple interface.
• Improve performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platform.
• Collaborate with researchers and infrastructure teams to support evolving workloads.

Skills

Distributed systems

Rust

Kubernetes

Observability tooling

Terraform

Grafana

Tools

Terraform

Grafana

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an engineer to help build the storage platform powering both research and production systems. This hands‑on role focuses on scalable, production‑grade storage infrastructure and deep ownership over end‑to‑end systems.

You’ll work on object storage, cross‑region data movement, lifecycle management, and a federation layer across multiple backends, with much of the stack in Kubernetes and services written in Rust.