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Software Engineer, Build Systems / CI

OpenAI· Applied AI
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San Francisco, New York City, Seattle$185k - $490kFull-timePosted 9mo ago

About the role

Engineer to evolve OpenAI's build and continuous integration systems, focusing on Bazel-based builds, Buildkite pipelines, test selection, remote caching/execution, CI observability, and tooling to improve developer productivity and system reliability.

Responsibilities

  • Own and evolve Bazel-based build and test workflows across a large, polyglot monorepo.
  • Design and maintain Starlark rules, macros, toolchains, and integrations that make builds reproducible, hermetic, and easy for product teams to adopt.
  • Improve CI performance and reliability across Buildkite pipelines, including queue time, build time, cache hit rates, test sharding, retry behavior, and flake isolation.
  • Build systems that reduce unnecessary CI work through affected-target detection, dependency graph analysis, test selection, caching, batching, and smarter scheduling.
  • Improve local development workflows so engineers can reproduce CI behavior, debug build failures, and iterate quickly without learning every detail of the build stack.
  • Operate and optimize build infrastructure across Docker/OCI images, Kubernetes-based runners, cloud resources, and remote cache/execution systems.
  • Instrument build and CI systems with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and analytics so we can measure speed, reliability, cost, and developer impact.
  • Partner directly with product, infrastructure, and research engineering teams to understand pain points, onboard projects, debug hard build issues, and remove systemic bottlenecks.
  • Use modern AI tools to rethink CI failure analysis, flaky test debugging, PR triage, automatic remediation, and developer-facing explanations.
  • Own the reliability of the systems you build, including participating in an on-call rotation for critical developer infrastructure.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience building infrastructure or tooling for developers.
  • Hands-on experience with Bazel, Buck, Pants, Gradle, or similar build systems, and understand the tradeoffs of hermetic builds, dependency graphs, caching, sandboxing, and remote execution.
  • Built or operated CI systems at scale, especially in environments where build time, queue time, test flakiness, and developer trust materially affect engineering velocity.
  • Comfortable writing production software for internal platforms, not just configuring tools; code, design, debugging, operations, and long-term ownership expected.
  • Ability to debug distributed build and CI failures across source control, dependency management, containers, runners, remote caches, test frameworks, and service infrastructure.
  • Care deeply about developer experience and empathy for friction sources that slow teams down or create operational toil.
  • Pragmatic about platform adoption: ability to build paved paths that teams want to use because they are faster, clearer, and more reliable.
  • Clear communication across teams; ability to turn ambiguous productivity problems into concrete technical plans.
  • Excited to apply AI to developer infrastructure in ways that enhance speed without compromising quality, reliability, or safety.

Skills

Required:BazelStarlarkBuild systems & CIDistributed systemsDeveloper experience
Nice to have:AI for DevOps

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
  • Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
  • Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
  • Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
  • 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
Last updated Jul 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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Company profileWebsite

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