Engineering Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Automation

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

5d

About The Position

About the Team The Cloud Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational platform that powers OpenAI’s production AI systems. We own large-scale Kubernetes platforms, cluster lifecycle and upgrades, global networking and traffic routing, service mesh, and the automation and guardrails that make the system reliable, secure, and scalable by default. Our mission is to make infrastructure predictable and boring at massive scale—so research and product teams can move fast without compromising safety, reliability, or efficiency. We operate at the intersection of platform engineering, distributed systems, and global networking, supporting products used by millions of users worldwide. About the Role We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead core Cloud Infrastructure teams responsible for OpenAI’s Kubernetes-based platform. This role is fundamentally about platform leadership: building teams, setting technical direction, and delivering infrastructure primitives that scale with OpenAI’s growth. You will manage engineers working on cluster lifecycle, infrastructure automation, reliability mechanisms, and networking foundations. You will partner closely with adjacent infrastructure, security, and product teams to ensure the platform can support rapid expansion in scale, regions, and workloads. This is a high-ownership leadership role with direct responsibility for production systems operating at extreme scale.

Requirements

• Have significant experience managing infrastructure or platform engineering teams.
• Bring deep hands-on understanding of Kubernetes at scale and distributed systems.
• Have operated production infrastructure with strict reliability, latency, and security requirements.
• Can balance technical depth with organizational leadership and long-term strategy.
• Have a strong track record of hiring, developing, and retaining senior engineers.
• Are comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and creating clarity for others.

Responsibilities

• Build, lead, and grow high-performing infrastructure engineering teams.
• Own the evolution of OpenAI’s Kubernetes platform, including cluster lifecycle, upgrades, configuration standards, and safety mechanisms.
• Set and enforce platform-level reliability goals (SLIs/SLOs), ensuring reliability is designed into the system.
• Drive infrastructure automation across provisioning, upgrades, remediation, and fleet consistency using Terraform and internal tooling.
• Reduce operational toil and incident frequency through better abstractions, guardrails, and self-healing systems.
• Establish clear ownership boundaries, technical direction, and execution discipline.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees