← All roles

Software Engineer, Infrastructure - Analytics Platform

OpenAI· Scaling
Apply on company site
Hybrid (San Francisco)$266k - $445kFull-timePosted 6mo ago

About the role

Hands-on software engineer responsible for ownership and end-to-end delivery of critical analytics platform systems used by OpenAI researchers to understand model quality and behavior, including ingestion, storage, querying, and visualization of metrics and structured/unstructured data.

Responsibilities

  • Own critical systems across architecture, implementation, integrations, deployment, monitoring, adoption, and related activities to make them useful.
  • Design, build, and operate the ingestion, storage, retrieval, and query systems behind research analytics at OpenAI.
  • Build platforms for analyzing both structured metrics and unstructured research data (samples, traces, evaluation results, model-behavior data).
  • Reason about algorithms, data structures, concurrency, storage layout, distributed systems, query performance, and failure modes.
  • Make architectural tradeoffs across ingestion-time processing, data models, storage formats, indexing, query execution, caching, and visualization performance.
  • Collaborate with researchers to understand goals, distinguish problems from proposed features, and translate recurring needs into platform components.
  • Identify and consolidate patterns across teams into shared infrastructure, APIs, or workflows.
  • Write code, investigate production issues, estimate work, guide other engineers, and address testing, rollout, observability, and rollback.
  • Keep solutions as simple as possible while addressing bottlenecks and reliability.

Qualifications

  • Experience owning a critical distributed system or research platform end-to-end.
  • Proficiency in high-performance languages (Rust or C++), including profiling, concurrency, async execution, memory behavior, serialization, I/O, networking, and failure analysis.
  • Deep expertise in distributed databases, storage engines, analytics systems, telemetry, logging, search, ingestion, or query execution.
  • Understanding of partitioning, replication, consistency, retries, backpressure, event lineage, and failure isolation.
  • Experience with ClickHouse or similar OLAP/columnar/time-series analytics systems (direct ClickHouse experience is helpful but not required).
  • Strong CS fundamentals and algorithmic reasoning; competitive programming is a plus.
  • Judgment to focus on practical bottlenecks and not over-engineer.
  • Strong engineering background with clear communication and business judgment.

Skills

Required:Distributed systems designRust or C++
Nice to have:ClickHouse or OLAP systems

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
  • 401(k) with employer match
  • Paid parental leave and caregiver leave
  • Paid time off and flexible PTO
  • 13+ paid company holidays and additional paid office closures
  • Paid sick time
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals and meal delivery credits
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional fringe benefits (e.g., charitable donation matching, wellness stipends) may be provided.
Last updated Sep 3, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

ai-infrastructure-and-developmentliquid-ai-recruiting-targetllmsetter-30setter-30-2026-q1speech-to-texttext-to-speechvoice-ai-stack
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at OpenAI