Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure

About the Team

ChatGPT is a rapidly evolving system: new capabilities ship continuously product surfaces change quickly and usage patterns shift week-to-week. Supporting that pace requires infrastructure that can handle real production constraintshigh concurrency unpredictable traffic patterns complex dependency graphs and frequent change.

The ChatGPT Infrastructure team builds and operates the platforms that enable fast iteration without compromising performance or reliability. We design shared systems data paths rollout mechanisms and reliability guardrails that teams rely on to ship changes to ChatGPT at scale.

We focus on high-leverage infrastructure: primitives and golden paths that incorporate operational lessons as defaults so engineers dont need to rediscover failure modes latency pitfalls or integration issues each time they build something new.

About the Role

Were hiring Senior and Staff Engineers to design and build infrastructure systems that underlie ChatGPT and multiply the effectiveness of teams building user experiences.

This is not a support-only role. Its a platform-building role: youll define interfaces develop core abstractions and create tooling to make safe fast iteration the norm. Your work will reduce friction prevent regressions improve performance and ensure systems scale gracefully as the product grows.

Where You Can Have Impact

• You might work on one or more of the following areas (without being restricted to any single area):

  • Platform foundations & frameworks: Core libraries service frameworks and shared components that standardize system building integration and evolution.

  • Scalability & performance primitives: Patterns and infrastructure that reduce tail latency improve throughput and keep costs predictable as demand increases.

  • Reliability guardrails: Mechanisms that prevent outages by designrate limiting load shedding dependency isolation backpressure safe fallbacks and robust regression controls.

  • Developer productivity via golden paths: Paved roads for common workflows (data access patterns service integration request lifecycle) that are fast safe and easy to use.

  • Observability & debugging systems: Instrumentation metrics models and investigative tooling that turn vague symptoms (its slow) into precise actionable diagnoses.

  • Safe change management: Deployment and rollout systems that support rapid iteration with confidenceprogressive delivery automated verification and fast rollback strategies.

  • Interface and contract design across boundaries: Clean APIs and stable contracts that reduce coupling and enable independent evolution across a complex ecosystem.

  What Youll Do

  • Build and evolve infrastructure platforms used by many engineers and services.

  • Translate real-world constraints into clean abstractions: simple APIs enforceable contracts safe defaults.

  • Drive improvements in reliability and performance through principled design measurement and iterative hardening.

  • Partner with engineering and product teams to identify systemic pain points and develop reusable solutions.

  • Own outcomes end-to-end: design implementation rollout operational maturity.

  Qualifications

  Minimum Qualifications

  • Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production (high throughput concurrency and failure handling).

  • Strong fundamentals in systems design including caching consistency queueing/backpressure and resilient dependency management.

  • Ability to reason about performance (latency distributions tail behavior bottlenecks) and translate analysis into concrete engineering work.

  • Track record of building platforms or shared infrastructure that improves velocity and correctness for other teams.

  • Excellent communication and collaboration skillsaligning on interfaces navigating tradeoffs and driving cross-team execution.

  Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience designing paved roads / golden paths (frameworks libraries self-serve tooling) that shape engineering behavior at scale.

  • Deep understanding of reliability techniques: graceful degradation circuit breakers load shedding rate limiting and fault isolation.

  • Experience building systems for safe iteration: progressive delivery correctness checks automated rollout gates and production validation.

  • Strong instincts for API and contract designhow to create interfaces that are stable evolvable and hard to misuse.

  • Prior work that demonstrates force multiplier impact: enabling many teams via a small set of well-crafted primitives.

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.

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Required Experience:

IC