Software Engineer, Traffic Infrastructure

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

2d • $266,000 - $445,000

About The Position

The Cloud Infrastructure team builds and operates the infrastructure behind OpenAI products, including ChatGPT and the API. The Traffic team is responsible for how traffic enters cloud environments, moves between services, clusters, and regions, and reaches external dependencies. Its scope includes cloud and Kubernetes networking, ingress and egress gateways, proxies, load balancing, and traffic steering.

The Software Engineer, Traffic Infrastructure will build and operate networking and traffic infrastructure connecting OpenAI products and services across clouds and regions. The work spans L3, L4, and L7 networking, from IP connectivity, NAT, and transport behavior to service proxies and application request routing. Projects may include gateways and control planes, cross-region connectivity, diagnosing packet loss or connection exhaustion, and making routing changes safer and easier to operate.

The role combines software engineering with production ownership. It involves turning ambiguous networking problems into durable improvements while working with service owners, infrastructure teams, Security, and cloud providers. The role is based in San Francisco, California, or Seattle, Washington.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience building production infrastructure or distributed systems, including substantial work on networking or traffic infrastructure.
• Depth in one or more areas such as cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, proxies and gateways, service meshes, load balancing, or global traffic routing.
• Understanding of networking fundamentals, including how IP routing, TCP/UDP, DNS, NAT, TLS, and HTTP/gRPC affect connectivity and performance.
• Hands-on experience building or operating systems such as Envoy, NGINX, Istio, Cilium, or comparable networking infrastructure.
• Ability to write production software in Go, Rust, C++, Python, or a similar language, and use software and automation to solve operational problems.
• Ability to investigate unfamiliar failures using evidence, test hypotheses, and follow problems through to verified resolution.
• Clear communication across teams when a problem crosses ownership boundaries.
• Interest in making infrastructure secure and understandable for the engineers who depend on it.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate ingress, egress, and service-to-service connectivity across clusters, regions, and clouds.
• Develop proxies, gateways, controllers, and automation for routing, load balancing, failover, and traffic management.
• Build and evolve cloud networking infrastructure, including private connectivity, NAT, and network isolation.
• Diagnose failures and performance bottlenecks across application, proxy, transport, and cloud networking layers, working with cloud providers when issues extend into their infrastructure.
• Build telemetry and diagnostic tools that explain traffic paths, identify failing components, and help engineers take effective action.
• Partner with Security to implement and validate traffic-path protections, including secure service communication, access controls, egress restrictions, and DDoS defenses.
• Improve latency, throughput, availability, and network efficiency through measurement, testing, and careful production rollouts.
• Create clear interfaces and safe defaults for service teams, participate in on-call, and turn operational lessons into changes that prevent recurring failures and reduce manual work.
• Take ownership of design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing reliability.

What This Job Offers

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