OpenAI· Systems· London, UK
Software Engineer, Platform Systems
Classified Tasks (14)
Automate 0%Augment 86%Human-Only 14%
Augment (12)
AI assists, human decides
Design and build distributed systems that provide visibility into large-scale training workloads and enable reliable operation at scale
technical
Design and build distributed failure detection, tracing, and profiling systems for large-scale AI training jobs
technical
Develop tooling to identify slow, faulty, or misbehaving nodes and provide actionable visibility into system behavior
technical
Implement tracing and observability systems that surface performance bottlenecks and help engineers understand and optimize massive distributed training jobs
technical
Improve observability, reliability, and performance across the training platform
operational
Debug and resolve issues in complex, high-throughput distributed systems
technical
Extend and adapt failure detection and tracing systems to support new training paradigms and workloads
technical
Build engineering and research infrastructure required to train flagship models on large, custom-built supercomputers
technical
Develop core model training software spanning collective communication, compute efficiency, parallelism strategies, and fault tolerance
technical
Work on collective communication, compute efficiency, parallelism strategies, fault tolerance, failure detection, and observability within the training stack
technical
Provide performance analysis and large-scale debugging to improve system behavior and training reliability
analytical
Operate and automate operational workflows to find and fix issues in large-scale training systems
operational
Human-Only (2)
Requires human judgment
Collaborate with systems, infrastructure, and research teams to evolve platform capabilities
communication
Collaborate closely with researchers across the organization to incorporate learnings into the evolution of the training platform
communication
Job description
Software Engineer, Platform Systems | OpenAI Careers ## Software Engineer, Platform Systems Systems - London, UK Apply now(opens in a new window) ## **About the Team** The Platform Systems team at OpenAI operates at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and large-scale distributed systems. We build the engineering and research infrastructure required to train OpenAI’s flagship models on some of the world’s largest, custom-built supercomputers. Our team develops core model training software and works deep in the stack - spanning collective communication, compute efficiency, parallelism strategies, fault tolerance, failure detection, and observability. The systems we build are foundational to OpenAI’s research velocity, enabling reliable, efficient training at frontier scale. We collaborate closely with researchers across the organization, continuously incorporating learnings from across OpenAI into the evolution of our training platform. ## **About the Role** As a Software Engineer, Platform Systems, you will design and build distributed systems that provide visibility into large-scale training workloads and help operate them reliably at scale. You’ll work on failure detection, tracing, and observability systems that identify slow or faulty nodes, surface performance bottlenecks, and help engineers understand and optimize massive distributed training jobs. This infrastructure is critical to operating OpenAI’s training stack and is actively evolving to support new use cases and increasingly complex workloads. This role sits at the core of our training infrastructure, blending systems engineering, performance analysis, and large-scale debugging. ## **In This Role, You Will** * Design and build distributed failure detection, tracing, and profiling systems for large-scale AI training jobs * Develop tooling to identify slow, faulty, or misbehaving nodes and provide actionable visibility into system behavior * Improve observability, reliability, and performance across OpenAI’s training platform * Debug and resolve issues in complex, high-throughput distributed systems * Collaborate with systems, infrastructure, and research teams to evolve platform capabilities * Extend and adapt failure detection systems or tracing systems to support new training paradigms and workloads ## **You Might Thrive in This Role If You** * Care deeply about performance, stability, and observability in distributed systems * Enjoy finding and fixing issues in large-scale systems and automating operational workflows * Have experience writing low-level software where system details matter * Understand hardware, operating systems, networking, concurrency, and distributed systems * Have a background in high-performance computing or low-level systems engineering * Are excited to work on critical infrastructure that powers frontier AI research **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