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Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

OpenAI· Applied AI
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Hybrid (San Francisco)Full-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Senior engineer role on the Search Product Infrastructure team responsible for designing, building, and operating systems that connect models with search at ChatGPT scale, focusing on search orchestration, inference efficiency, experimentation, and production reliability.

Responsibilities

  • Design and evolve the services that coordinate search classification, retrieval, ranking, and model inference, working closely with researchers and partner engineering teams to bring new capabilities into production.
  • Improve end-to-end latency, throughput, and infrastructure efficiency through profiling, caching, request routing, and capacity planning, making informed tradeoffs between search quality, reliability, and compute cost.
  • Build experimentation tooling and automation to run reproducible A/B tests, define success metrics, and measure product impact. Use shadow traffic and load testing to validate system behavior, estimate capacity needs, and support safe production rollouts.
  • Own production reliability through observability, resilient fallback behavior, incident response, and automation that improves launch safety and reduces operational toil.
  • Build search APIs and tool interfaces that enable models and agents to retrieve information reliably while respecting access controls and preserving source attribution.

Qualifications

  • Significant experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with depth in performance, reliability, or resource efficiency.
  • Experience in one or more of search, information retrieval, ML infrastructure, inference serving, or other high-throughput online systems.
  • Strong programming and systems debugging skills, and comfortable working across languages and unfamiliar parts of a production stack.
  • Ability to turn ambiguous product or research needs into clear technical plans, align partners across teams, and carry projects through deployment and measurable results.
  • Willingness to learn across systems and ML, investigate unfamiliar problems, and share technical decisions and lessons clearly with others.

Skills

Required:Distributed systems design and operationSearch / Information retrieval / ML infrastructureProgramming and systems debugging

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, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
Last updated Oct 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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