Software Engineer, Infrastructure - Analytics Platform

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

9h • Hybrid

About The Position

About the Team
The Scaling team designs, builds, and operates critical infrastructure that enables research at OpenAI.
Our mission is simple: accelerate the progress of research towards AGI. We do this by building core systems that researchers rely on - ranging from low-level infrastructure components to research-facing custom applications. These systems must scale with the increasing complexity and size of our workloads, while remaining reliable and easy to use.
About the Role
We’re looking for a staff-level software engineer to own production-critical infrastructure end to end.
This role is centered on backend / systems engineering, with emphasis on low-level performance, distributed systems, and hands-on operation of critical services at scale. You’ll take ambiguous problems, turn them into concrete plans, ship pragmatic solutions quickly, and improve them through production feedback and iteration.
This is not a general Python backend role. We’re specifically looking for strong systems experience in Rust or C++, especially in performance-sensitive infrastructure.
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

• A 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++.
• Comfort working below typical service abstractions, including concurrency, async execution, memory behavior, serialization, I/O, networking, profiling, and failure analysis.
• Experience designing, building, or operating distributed systems or distributed databases at meaningful scale.
• 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.
• A habit of shipping practical first versions and improving them through production feedback.

Nice To Haves

• Preferably, experience with ClickHouse-like systems or infrastructure for analytics, telemetry, logging, search, ingestion, storage, or query execution.

Responsibilities

• Own critical infrastructure across design, implementation, rollout, operation, and iteration.
• Build and operate performant backend systems in Rust or C++ that support core research workflows.
• Design and improve distributed data and serving systems, including tradeoffs around partitioning, replication, consistency, retries, backpressure, and failure isolation.
• Debug real production bottlenecks across 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 reliability of services running on Kubernetes, including resource tuning and failure handling.
• Partner closely with engineers and researchers to deliver fast, reliable, useful systems.
• Raise the bar through strong technical judgment, ownership, and follow-through.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees