OpenAI· Applied AI Infrastructure· San Francisco
Software Engineer, Observability
Comp$255K – $405K
Classified Tasks (10)
Automate 0%Augment 90%Human-Only 10%
Augment (9)
AI assists, human decides
Own and maintain core observability infrastructure, including distributed logging, time series, and trace storage
technical
Design and maintain data ingestion pipelines that process petabytes of logs and billions of time-series metrics
technical
Build scalable observability infrastructure spanning backend, infra, and product components
technical
Develop AI-native tools that detect, triage, and resolve engineering issues autonomously
technical
Implement agents or automation that summarize SEVs (service events) and generate actionable incident summaries
technical
Implement features that auto-generate dashboards from telemetry and alerting signals
technical
Build notebook-like UIs and interactive debugging tools to help engineers investigate incidents
technical
Contribute to UI experiences such as dashboards, notebooking, and interactive debugging interfaces
creative
Build foundational internal tools to improve reliability, performance, and observability of production systems
technical
Human-Only (1)
Requires human judgment
Collaborate closely with engineers, researchers, user ops, and other cross-functional teams to design and deliver the observability product
communication
Job description
Software Engineer, Observability | OpenAI Careers ## Software Engineer, Observability Applied AI Infrastructure - San Francisco Apply now(opens in a new window) Join the engineering teams that bring OpenAI’s ideas safely to the world!! The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. **About the Role** We’re building the observability product for OpenAI—from scalable infrastructure to a rich, AI-powered UI. Our systems ingest over petabytes of logs and billions of time series metrics across our fleet. We're now layering intelligence on top—think agents that summarize SEVs, auto-generate dashboards, or help engineers debug through notebook-like UIs. We’re hiring software engineers across the stack—infra, backend, and product. You’ll join a small, gritty team building both foundational infra and novel internal tools to make OpenAI's production systems reliable, performant, and observable. **What You’ll Do** * Own core observability infrastructure, including distributed logging, time series, and trace storage * Build AI-native tools that help engineers detect, understand, and resolve issues autonomously. * Contribute to UI experiences like dashboards, notebooking, or interactive debugging * Collaborate closely with engineers, researchers, user ops, and other teams across the company to build the next generation observability product **You Might Be a Fit If You:** * Have operated large-scale distributed systems in production. ( especially logging systems or some other time series databases) * Thrive in ambiguous environments and roll up your sleeves to solve unscoped problems. * Have full-stack chops or product sensibilities—you're excited to build real tools people use. * Have strong fundamentals in systems, networking, and cloud infra (Kubernetes, AWS, etc). * Bonus: built or contributed to observability systems (e.g. Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc). **Why This Team** * We’re both an infra and product team—building a real AI application for internal use. * Your work will directly power the reliability of GPT-based products at massive scale. * You'll help define what "AI-powered observability" looks like at one of the world’s most advanced AI labs. **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 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. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties,