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Software Engineer, Compute Foundations

OpenAI· Scaling
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San Francisco$255k - $490kFull-timePosted 4w ago

About the role

Role focused on building distributed systems to provision, configure, and manage GPU compute infrastructure across sites and providers. Combines software architecture with understanding of data centers, aiming to improve control-plane throughput, reliability, and scalability of OpenAI’s compute fleet.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate Kubernetes-based controllers and distributed services that coordinate infrastructure across sites, isolate failures, and scale as GPU capacity grows.
  • Define APIs and resource models that let clients request and track lifecycle operations through consistent interfaces across hardware platforms and providers.
  • Build provisioning and configuration services that coordinate network boot, hardware management interfaces, and the deployment of firmware, operating-system images, drivers, and host configuration.
  • Develop lifecycle management for discovery, allocation, provisioning, upgrades, maintenance, recovery, and decommissioning, integrating with health and validation systems.
  • Design reliable reconciliation and recovery through concurrent changes, interrupted operations, and partial failures, with staged rollouts that limit disruption across nodes, racks, and clusters.
  • Improve control-plane throughput, API latency, and the time infrastructure takes to reach its desired state, while respecting the limits of site systems and provider APIs.
  • Build the software integrations that bring new sites and GPU hardware generations into the platform, partnering with hardware, networking, data-center, and other infrastructure teams.

Qualifications

  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience designing, implementing, and owning production distributed systems or infrastructure services.
  • Experience developing infrastructure systems that use Kubernetes APIs and reconciliation to manage resources.
  • Understanding of how a bare-metal node moves from power-on to a configured, workload-ready system, with depth in areas such as PXE, DHCP/DNS, BMCs, firmware, Linux, drivers, images, or configuration management.
  • Ability to design reliable APIs and asynchronous workflows, reasoning about concurrency, consistency, idempotency, and failures across service and provider boundaries.
  • Ability to diagnose reliability and performance problems across service, operating-system, and machine boundaries, turning production evidence into lasting software improvements.
  • Willingness to work across engineering specialties and communicate system behavior and tradeoffs clearly.

Skills

Required:Distributed systems designKubernetes APIs and reconciliationBare-metal node lifecycle knowledgeAPIs and asynchronous workflowsReliability and performance diagnosticsCross-team collaboration

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 offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits (e.g., charitable donation matching and wellness stipends)
  • More details available during hiring process
Last updated Sep 24, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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