Network Operations Engineer, AI Networking

About the Team

OpenAIs Infrastructure Operations team is responsible for the availability reliability and operational excellence of one of the worlds largest AI infrastructure networks. The team owns day-to-day operations of production AI networks across Industrial Computes data centers working with colocation providers deployment teams and hardware vendors to deliver highly available GPU infrastructure for AI training and inference workloads.

About the Role

We are seeking an Infrastructure Operations Engineer to operate and improve the large-scale Ethernet fabrics that support GPU clusters storage systems and management infrastructure. This role combines hands-on production operations with automation observability and incident response across a global AI network.

The ideal candidate has experience operating high-availability data center cloud AI or HPC networks and can move comfortably from physical-layer troubleshooting to routing and fabric behavior change execution and root-cause analysis. You will partner closely with network architecture systems engineering GPU engineering storage engineering security deployment site operations service providers colocation partners and hardware vendors to raise reliability and reduce operational toil.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the operational health availability and reliability of production AI network infrastructure across Industrial Computes data centers.

• Monitor troubleshoot and resolve network incidents while meeting service-level objectives (SLOs) reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and minimizing Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).

• Operate and maintain large-scale Ethernet fabrics supporting GPU compute storage and management networks.

• Execute production network changes maintenance windows and capacity expansions with minimal customer impact.

• Manage the hardware lifecycle including switch and optics replacements RMA coordination software upgrades and preventive maintenance.

• Support new AI cluster deployments data center expansions and infrastructure migrations in partnership with deployment and engineering teams.

• Partner with cloud service providers (CSPs) colocation providers Smart Hands teams and hardware vendors to maintain production infrastructure.

• Perform root-cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents and drive permanent corrective actions that eliminate recurring issues.

• Build and maintain monitoring telemetry dashboards and alerting to improve network observability and proactive issue detection.

• Develop and improve operational runbooks playbooks troubleshooting documentation and standard operating procedures.

• Automate repetitive operational tasks using Python and infrastructure automation frameworks to reduce toil and improve efficiency.

• Continuously identify opportunities to improve service reliability scalability operational maturity and engineering efficiency.

Qualifications

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Network Engineering or a related discipline or equivalent practical experience.

• 5 years of experience operating large-scale data center cloud AI or HPC network infrastructure.

• Experience supporting production network environments with high-availability requirements.

• Hands-on experience with one or more of the following platforms: Cisco NX-OS Arista EOS NVIDIA Spectrum / Cumulus Linux or Juniper JunOS.

• Strong knowledge of Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking BGP OSPF ECMP MLAG LACP VRFs and VLANs.

• Experience troubleshooting physical infrastructure including fiber optics transceivers DAC/AOC cables and high-speed Ethernet links.

• Experience performing software upgrades hardware maintenance and production change management.

• Excellent analytical and troubleshooting skills with the ability to communicate technical risk clearly across teams.

Preferred Skills

• Experience operating AI or High-Performance Computing (HPC) network environments.

• Experience with NVIDIA AI networking technologies and GPU infrastructure.

• Experience supporting RoCE v2 or RDMA-based Ethernet fabrics with a strong understanding of Priority Flow Control (PFC) Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Data Center Quantized Congestion Notification (DCQCN) Quality of Service (QoS) and lossless Ethernet networking.

• Experience supporting 100G 200G 400G and 800G Ethernet networks.

• Experience with GPU platforms including NVIDIA HGX DGX GB200 or equivalent AI infrastructure.

• Experience supporting distributed storage environments such as VAST DDN or similar technologies.

• Experience working with cloud service providers such as AWS Azure or Google Cloud and with third-party colocation providers.

• Experience with network monitoring and telemetry technologies including Prometheus Grafana gNMI streaming telemetry SNMP or similar tools.

• Experience developing automation using Python Git REST APIs Terraform or similar automation frameworks.

Work Environment and On-Call

• Participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation supporting mission-critical AI infrastructure.

• Support time-sensitive production incidents maintenance windows capacity expansions and network changes with a focus on service availability and minimal customer impact.

• This role requires up to 30% travel to data center locations for new turnups and acceptance activities as needed.

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:

IC