Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure
Remote • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 4mo ago
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Infrastructure Engineer
About the job
OpenAI is seeking Senior and Staff Engineers to join the ChatGPT Infrastructure team. This role focuses on designing and building the foundational infrastructure systems that power ChatGPT, enabling rapid iteration and development without compromising performance or reliability. You will create shared systems, data paths, rollout mechanisms, and reliability guardrails that allow other engineering teams to ship changes at scale. This is a platform-building role where you will define interfaces, develop core abstractions, and create tooling to ensure safe and fast iteration, reduce friction, prevent regressions, and improve performance as the product grows.
Responsibilities
- Build and evolve infrastructure platforms used by many engineers and services.
- Translate real-world constraints into clean abstractions, including simple APIs, enforceable contracts, and safe defaults.
- Drive improvements in reliability and performance through principled design, measurement, and iterative hardening.
- Partner with engineering and product teams to identify systemic pain points and develop reusable solutions.
- Own outcomes end-to-end, from design and implementation to rollout and operational maturity.
Requirements
- Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, handling high throughput, concurrency, and failures.
- Strong fundamentals in systems design, including caching, consistency, queueing/backpressure, and resilient dependency management.
- Ability to reason about performance, including latency distributions, tail behavior, and bottlenecks, and translate analysis into engineering work.
- Track record of building platforms or shared infrastructure that improves velocity and correctness for other teams.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills for aligning on interfaces, navigating tradeoffs, and driving cross-team execution.
- Experience designing paved roads/golden paths (frameworks, libraries, self-serve tooling) that shape engineering behavior at scale.
- Deep understanding of reliability techniques such as graceful degradation, circuit breakers, load shedding, rate limiting, and fault isolation.
- Experience building systems for safe iteration, including progressive delivery, correctness checks, automated rollout gates, and production validation.
- Strong instincts for API and contract design, creating interfaces that are stable, evolvable, and hard to misuse.
- Demonstrated "force multiplier" impact, enabling many teams through well-crafted primitives.