Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Overview

Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure — OpenAI. This role focuses on building and operating data infrastructure that supports massive compute fleets and storage systems, designed for high performance and scalability.

About the Team

Data Platform at OpenAI owns the foundational data stack powering critical product, research, and analytics workflows. We operate large Spark compute fleets in production, design and build data lakes and metadata systems on Iceberg and Delta, run high throughput streaming platforms on Kafka and Flink, provide orchestration with Airflow, and support ML feature engineering tooling such as Chronon. Our mission is to deliver reliable, secure, and efficient data access at scale and accelerate intelligent, AI assisted data workflows.

About the Role

This role builds and operates data infrastructure that supports massive compute fleets and storage systems, designed for high performance and scalability. You’ll design, build, and operate the next generation of data infrastructure at OpenAI. You will scale and harden big data compute and storage platforms, build and support high-throughput streaming systems, develop low latency data ingestion, enable secure and governed data access for ML and analytics, and design for reliability and performance at extreme scale.

You will take full lifecycle ownership : architecture, implementation, production operations, and on-call participation.

You’ve supported Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Trino, or Iceberg as platforms. You’re well-versed in infrastructure tooling like Terraform, experienced in debugging large-scale distributed systems, and excited about solving data infrastructure problems in the AI space.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, and machine learning infrastructure while ensuring scalability, reliability, and security
• Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient
• Accelerate company productivity by empowering engineers and teammates with excellent data tooling and systems
• Collaborate with product, research and analytics teams to build the technical foundations that unlock new features and experiences
• Own the reliability of the systems you build, including participation in an on-call rotation for critical incidents

Qualifications

This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

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 AI capabilities and seek to safely deploy them through our products. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other legally protected characteristics.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

Compensation

$210K – $405K + Equity

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