Software Engineer, Core Services

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

205d • Hybrid

About The Position

As a software engineer in the core services team, you will design and operate critical backend platforms such as caching systems, workflow orchestration, metadata stores, and file services. You'll focus on building highly reliable, scalable, and performant systems that serve as the backbone of our products. We're looking for people who are passionate about building infrastructure that empowers product teams, love working on distributed systems challenges, and enjoy creating well-designed APIs and abstractions that accelerate development. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Requirements

• Experience with distributed systems, caching infrastructure (e.g., Redis, Memcached), metadata storage (e.g., FoundationDB), or workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal, Cadence).
• Experience running containerized services in cloud environments and integrating them into automated build/test/release (CI/CD) workflows.
• Understand trade-offs in consistency models, replication strategies, and performance optimization in multi-region systems.
• Excel at communication and collaboration with cross-functional teams, and are obsessed with delivering customer success.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain shared infrastructure services such as caching layers, workflow orchestration (Temporal), metadata stores, and file storage services.
• Collaborate with product teams to provide scalable, reliable primitives that abstract the complexities of distributed systems.
• Improve performance, resilience, and scalability of core services that power customer-facing applications.

Benefits

• Hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week.
• Relocation assistance to new employees.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Industry: Publishing Industries
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees