Software Engineer, Build Systems / CI

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

3d • $185,000 - $490,000

About The Position

The Engineering Acceleration team builds and operates the foundational systems that engineers use to build, test, and ship ChatGPT, the API, and OpenAI's infrastructure. We are looking for an engineer to help evolve our build and CI systems for a fast-growing engineering organization. This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, build systems, distributed infrastructure, and software quality. You will work on systems that make engineering faster and safer: reliable CI pipelines, scalable Bazel infrastructure, high-signal test selection, fast feedback loops, and tooling that helps engineers understand and fix failures quickly. Our mission is to make OpenAI one of the most productive engineering organizations in the world while preserving a high bar for correctness, reliability, and safety.

Requirements

• Have 5+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience building infrastructure or tooling for developers.
• Have hands-on experience with Bazel, Buck, Pants, Gradle, or similar build systems, and understand the tradeoffs of hermetic builds, dependency graphs, caching, and remote execution.
• Have built or operated CI systems at scale, especially in environments where build time, queue time, test flakiness, and developer trust materially affect engineering velocity.
• Care deeply about developer experience and have empathy for the small sources of friction that slow teams down or create operational toil.
• Are comfortable debugging distributed systems and using metrics, logs, traces, and structured data to understand reliability and performance problems.
• Can work across teams, communicate clearly, and turn ambiguous productivity problems into concrete technical plans.
• Are excited to apply AI to developer infrastructure in ways that make engineers faster without weakening quality or safety.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate CI infrastructure that gives engineers fast, reliable feedback on every change.
• Improve Bazel-based build and test workflows across a large, polyglot codebase, including dependency modeling, remote caching, remote execution, and build/test performance.
• Build systems that reduce unnecessary CI work through affected-target detection, test selection, caching, batching, and smarter scheduling.
• Partner closely with product and infrastructure teams to understand their workflows, pain points, and reliability needs, then turn those into practical platform improvements.
• Improve the observability and debuggability of build and CI failures, making it easier for engineers to distinguish product regressions, infrastructure failures, and flakes.
• Use modern AI tools to rethink how engineers interact with CI: failure explanation, fix suggestions, automatic retries, and agent-assisted debugging.
• Own the reliability of the systems you build, including participating in an on-call rotation for critical developer infrastructure.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed