Engineering Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Automation

About the Team

The Cloud Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational platform that powers OpenAIs 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 scaleso 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 OpenAIs Kubernetes-based platform. This role is fundamentally about platform leadership: building teams setting technical direction and delivering infrastructure primitives that scale with OpenAIs 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.

In this role you will:

• Build lead and grow high-performing infrastructure engineering teams.

• Own the evolution of OpenAIs 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.
  

You might thrive in this role if you:

• 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.
  

Technical Environment

• Kubernetes across many clusters and regions

• Service mesh (Istio / Envoy)

• Global networking and load balancing (Cloudflare cloud-native primitives)

• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and internal automation

• Observability via metrics logging and tracing

• Large-scale production systems with high reliability and safety requirements

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core and to achieve our mission we must encompass and value the many different perspectives voices and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer and we do not discriminate on the basis of race religion color national origin sex sexual orientation age veteran status disability genetic information or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information please see OpenAIs Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary confidential and non-public addition job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Required Experience:

Manager