OpenAI· Frontiers Clusters· San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and London, UK
Software Engineer, Compute Infrastructure
Comp$230K – $405K
Classified Tasks (33)
Automate 6%Augment 82%Human-Only 12%
Automate (2)
Fully handled by AI agents
Schedule workloads and manage job scheduling systems
operational
Detect hardware and fleet-health issues through monitoring and telemetry
analytical
Augment (27)
AI assists, human decides
Design systems that connect accelerators, CPUs, networks, storage, data centers, orchestration software, agent infrastructure, developer tools, and observability into a coherent user experience
technical
Provision hardware and platform infrastructure for compute clusters
operational
Operate compute clusters and supporting platform services
operational
Optimize system performance across hardware, software, and network layers
technical
Plan capacity and manage cluster lifecycle
operational
Implement and maintain bare-metal automation
technical
Develop and maintain distributed systems software
technical
Build and operate Kubernetes-based orchestration and scheduling systems
technical
Perform deep system-level performance optimization
technical
Engineer and tune high-performance networking fabrics and protocols
technical
Build and maintain scalable storage systems and abstractions
technical
Monitor, measure, and improve fleet health and reliability
operational
Profile workloads and run benchmarks to evaluate performance
analytical
Improve developer experience for infrastructure users through tooling and workflows
technical
Bring new supercomputing capacity online and integrate it into the platform
operational
Analyze profiler traces and benchmark data to optimize training workloads
analytical
Improve NCCL and collective communication behavior
technical
Design abstractions that make heterogeneous clusters behave like a single coherent platform
technical
Write durable, production-grade software for infrastructure systems
technical
Build low-level platform primitives to make heterogeneous hardware, providers, and data centers repeatable, automatable, and operable at scale
technical
Turn raw capacity into reliable, efficient clusters that researchers and product teams can use with minimal friction
operational
Build and operate observability systems for networking and infrastructure
technical
Implement preventative measures to reduce future hardware and fleet-health incidents
operational
Develop control-plane and data-plane components that connect hardware to users and services
technical
Design, build, and maintain CaaS (Cluster-as-a-Service) and agent infrastructure
technical
Create APIs, tools, and workflows to make the platform more usable for researchers and engineers
technical
Benchmark and validate system performance under large-scale training and serving workloads
analytical
Human-Only (4)
Requires human judgment
Diagnose GPU, NIC, topology, firmware, thermal, and failure-mode issues
operational
Mentor and elevate the engineering quality and velocity of teammates
leadership
Diagnose root causes of hardware and fleet incidents
operational
Remediate hardware and fleet failures and outages
operational
Job description
Software Engineer, Compute Infrastructure | OpenAI Careers ## Software Engineer, Compute Infrastructure Frontiers Clusters - San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and London, UK Apply now(opens in a new window) **About the Team:** Compute Infrastructure builds the platform that turns enormous amounts of compute into a reliable engine for frontier AI. We design, provision, schedule, operate, and optimize the systems that connect accelerators, CPUs, networks, storage, data centers, orchestration software, agent infrastructure, developer tools, and observability into one coherent experience for researchers and product teams. Our work spans the entire stack: capacity planning and cluster lifecycle, bare-metal automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes and scheduling, deep system optimization, high-performance networking, storage, fleet health, reliability, workload profiling, benchmarking, and the developer experience that lets teams use enormous compute systems with confidence. At this scale, small improvements to communication, scheduling, hardware efficiency, or debugging workflows can compound into meaningful research velocity. We are hiring across Compute Infrastructure rather than for a single narrow team, and we use this opening to match strong engineers to the problems where they can have the most leverage. **About the Role** We are looking for engineers who want to build the compute platform behind OpenAI's research and products. You may be strongest in low-level systems, high-performance computing, distributed infrastructure, reliability, CaaS, agent infrastructure, developer platforms, tooling, or the user experience around infrastructure. What matters is that you can reason carefully about complex systems, write durable software, and raise the quality and velocity of the people around you. Depending on your background and interests, you might work close to hardware, close to users, on CaaS and agent infrastructure, or on the control planes and data planes in between. You could help bring new supercomputing capacity online, optimize training workloads from profiler traces and benchmarks, improve NCCL and collective communication behavior, reason about GPUs, NICs, topology, firmware, thermals, and failure modes, or design abstractions that make heterogeneous clusters feel like one coherent platform. We do not expect every candidate to have worked at every layer. Some engineers will go deep on systems performance, kernel or runtime behavior, large-scale networking protocols, RDMA, NCCL, GPU hardware behavior, benchmarking, scheduling, or hardware reliability; others will make the platform more usable through APIs, tools, workflows, and developer experience. The common thread is strong engineering judgment and excitement about making enormous compute systems faster, more reliable, and easier to use. This is a general opening for Compute Infrastructure. We will consider candidates for teams across Compute Infrastructure and match you based on your strengths, the problems that motivate you, and where the infrastructure needs are highest. **Where you might work** * **Compute Foundations:** Build the low-level platform primitives that make heterogeneous hardware, providers, and data centers repeatable, automatable, and operable at scale. * **Fleet / Orchestration:** Turn raw capacity into reliable, efficient clusters and scheduling systems that researchers and product teams can use with minimal friction and great experience. * **Core Network Engineering:** Build and operate the high-performance networking fabrics, protocols, and observability needed for the largest training and serving workloads. * **Hardware Health and Observability:** Detect, diagnose, remediate, and prevent hardware and fleet-health issues so usable compute stays high across providers and accelerator generations. * **Storage:** Build scalable, performant, durable storage abstractions that keep data movement an