OpenAI· Workload· San Francisco
Software Engineer, Infrastructure - Analytics Platform
Comp$230K – $385K
Classified Tasks (14)
Automate 0%Augment 86%Human-Only 14%
Augment (12)
AI assists, human decides
Own production-critical infrastructure end-to-end, including design, implementation, rollout, operation, and iteration.
operational
Build and operate performant backend systems in Rust or C++ to support core research workflows.
technical
Design and improve distributed data and serving systems, making tradeoffs around partitioning, replication, consistency, retries, backpressure, and failure isolation.
technical
Debug production bottlenecks affecting latency, throughput, contention, hot spots, and overload behavior.
technical
Improve reliability of Kubernetes-hosted services by tuning resources and implementing failure handling.
operational
Turn ambiguous problems into concrete plans.
leadership
Ship pragmatic solutions quickly.
operational
Iterate on shipped solutions using production feedback and continuous improvement.
operational
Design, build, and operate core systems ranging from low-level infrastructure components to research-facing custom applications.
technical
Scale systems to accommodate increasing workload complexity and size while maintaining reliability and usability.
technical
Work below typical service abstractions on concurrency, async execution, memory behavior, serialization, I/O, networking, profiling, and failure analysis.
technical
Conduct profiling and failure analysis to optimize low-level performance and system behavior.
technical
Human-Only (2)
Requires human judgment
Operate business-critical services by participating in on-call rotations, responding to incidents, conducting postmortems, maintaining observability, ensuring rollout safety, and performing zero-downtime migrations.
operational
Partner with engineers and researchers to deliver fast, reliable, and useful systems.
communication
Job description
Software Engineer, Infrastructure - Analytics Platform | OpenAI Careers ## Software Engineer, Infrastructure - Analytics Platform Workload - San Francisco Apply now(opens in a new window) ## **About the Team** The Scaling team designs, builds, and operates critical infrastructure that enables research at OpenAI. Our mission is simple: accelerate the progress of research towards AGI. We do this by building core systems that researchers rely on - ranging from low-level infrastructure components to research-facing custom applications. These systems must scale with the increasing complexity and size of our workloads, while remaining reliable and easy to use. ## **About the Role** We’re looking for an experienced software engineer to own production-critical infrastructure end to end. This role is centered on backend / systems engineering, with emphasis on low-level performance, distributed systems, and hands-on operation of critical services at scale. You’ll take ambiguous problems, turn them into concrete plans, ship pragmatic solutions quickly, and improve them through production feedback and iteration. This is not a general Python backend role. We’re specifically looking for strong systems experience in Rust or C++, especially in performance-sensitive infrastructure. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. ## **In this role, you will:** * Own critical infrastructure across design, implementation, rollout, operation, and iteration. * Build and operate performant backend systems in Rust or C++ that support core research workflows. * Design and improve distributed data and serving systems, including tradeoffs around partitioning, replication, consistency, retries, backpressure, and failure isolation. * Debug real production bottlenecks across latency, throughput, contention, hot spots, and overload behavior. * Operate business-critical services through on-call, incidents, postmortems, observability, rollout safety, and zero-downtime migrations. * Improve reliability of services running on Kubernetes, including resource tuning and failure handling. * Partner closely with engineers and researchers to deliver fast, reliable, useful systems. * Raise the bar through strong technical judgment, ownership, and follow-through. ## **You might thrive in this role if you have:** * A track record of owning operationally critical systems end to end and delivering outcomes in ambiguous environments. * Strong hands-on experience building performance-sensitive backend systems in Rust or C++. * Comfort working below typical service abstractions, including concurrency, async execution, memory behavior, serialization, I/O, networking, profiling, and failure analysis. * Experience designing, building, or operating distributed systems or distributed databases at meaningful scale. * Preferably, experience with ClickHouse-like systems or infrastructure for analytics, telemetry, logging, search, ingestion, storage, or query execution. * Hands-on experience operating production-critical systems, including incidents, observability, rollout safety, and recurrence prevention. * Strong judgment in balancing engineering quality, speed, risk, and business impact. * A habit of shipping practical first versions and improving them through production feedback. **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 a