Base Salary
$230k - $385k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own critical infrastructure across design, implementation, rollout, operation, and iteration.
- Build and operate performant backend systems in Rust or C++ supporting core research workflows.
- Design and improve distributed data and serving systems involving partitioning, replication, consistency, retries, backpressure, and failure isolation.
- Debug production bottlenecks involving 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 the reliability of services running on Kubernetes through resource tuning and failure handling.
- Partner with engineers and researchers to deliver fast, reliable, useful systems.
- Raise technical standards through judgment, ownership, and follow-through.
Requirements
- 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++.
- Experience with concurrency, asynchronous 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.
- Ability to ship practical first versions and improve them through production feedback.
Benefits
- Hybrid work model requiring 3 days in the San Francisco office per week.
- Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core. OpenAI is dedicated to putting that alignment of interests first — ahead of profit. To achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. Our investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion is ongoing, executed through a wide range of initiatives, and championed and supported by leadership. At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.