Software Engineer, Compute Foundations

About the Team Frontier Systems Foundations, part of Compute Foundations at OpenAI, builds the systems software foundation that turns new compute infrastructure into reliable, usable capacity for frontier model training. Our mission is to make some of the world's largest GPU clusters work reliably for frontier training. We bring new platforms and clusters online, safely maintain installed fleets, and partner with hardware, infrastructure, and research teams to resolve the system-level issues that keep jobs from running. That means building and maintaining the software closest to the machine: Linux and Ubuntu operating-system images, kernels and modules, drivers, packages and repositories, disks and boot configuration, firmware integration, provisioning, and system-level validation. We make these components reproducible, compatible, and safe to operate across heterogeneous fleets. About the Role We are looking for systems software engineers with deep Linux and host-systems experience to build, qualify, and maintain the operating-system foundation for OpenAI's frontier compute fleet. Relevant backgrounds include kernel and module development, Linux distribution or image engineering, package management, firmware and driver integration, disks and boot, and bare-metal provisioning. You'll work closely with hardware engineers, vendors, and infrastructure teams to bring up new platforms, integrate system components, and debug failures across firmware, disks, boot, operating systems, kernels, drivers, and workload interactions. Your work will directly influence how quickly new capacity becomes usable and how reliably large GPU fleets operate. You should be comfortable writing and maintaining production-quality systems software and automation, but we do not expect expertise across every layer. This is an opportunity to go deep on challenging systems problems while building the image, package, qualification, and recovery paths that power the next generation of frontier models

About the Team OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products (such as ChatGPT & Codex) that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide. The Applied Foundations team owns the core product and platform layers that make those experiences possible — from identity & access, to safety to payments & commerce across all of our apps. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to deliver technology that is reliable, secure, and trusted at global scale. About the Role We’re hiring Backend Software Engineers to design and implement safe services and infrastructure that power our core products. What You’ll Do Architect, build, and improve scalable backend systems and APIs. Drive performance, reliability, and safety across distributed services. Implement data storage, retrieval, compute, and integration solutions. Participate in long-term architectural planning and technical design reviews. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience. You Might Thrive Here If You: Have strong experience with distributed systems, APIs, and backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, C++). Have experience setting up and maintaining production backend services and data pipelines. Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed. Enjoy building resilient services that handle large scale and complexity. Are self-directed and enjoy figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. 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 the capabilities of AI systems and seek

About the Team Security is foundational to OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security organization protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products by building and operating deeply technical systems that must work reliably at massive scale. Our work underpins OpenAI’s commitments around safety, privacy, and security across research, products, and emerging platforms. The Host Assurance team exists to make bare metal and VMs dependable & scalable foundations for OpenAI: secure by default, verifiable in practice, and resilient across providers and operating models. We operate at the trust boundary between hardware and cloud-scale orchestration, ensuring that hosts are eligible to safely run workloads with predictable security properties and auditability. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer, Host Assurance to build and operate the services, APIs, and host software that establish and maintain trust in our compute infrastructure. You will own production software from design and implementation through testing, rollout, observability, and operation. Your work will support capabilities such as machine identity, certificate issuance and enrollment, secure bootstrap, and host attestation across bare-metal and VM environments. Success in this role requires strong technical judgment, the ability to reason across software and host-system boundaries and learn unfamiliar parts of the stack, and a practical mindset for building systems that are secure, reliable, and usable in fast-moving production environments. The systems you build will sit on the critical path of OpenAI’s frontier infrastructure investments and will directly shape how large amounts of compute are brought online - securely, responsibly, and at global scale - underpinning long-lived commitments around privacy, security, and reliability. You will partner closely with infrastructure, research, and confidential computing initiatives—inc

About the Team The Storage Infrastructure team builds and operates the storage foundation behind OpenAI’s most demanding workloads. We work directly with research to design storage systems for rapidly evolving experiments, while also powering production at scale. We own the platform end to end: backend systems, user-facing services and APIs, and the control planes that manage how data is placed, moved, and retained over time. Our stack spans cloud and in-house object stores across very different workload profiles, from GPU-attached systems to dedicated storage hardware. We also build the federation layer that unifies these backends behind a simple interface and routes each workload to the right storage solution. About the Role You will help build the storage platform that powers OpenAI’s research and production systems. This is a hands-on infrastructure role for engineers who want to work on deeply technical systems at scale and own them in production. You’ll work across object storage, cross-region data movement, lifecycle management, and the federation layer that provides a unified interface across multiple backends. Much of our stack runs on Kubernetes, and we primarily build services in Rust. In this role, you will: Build and operate storage services that underpin OpenAI’s research infrastructure Develop object storage systems across cloud and in-house environments Build systems for cross-region data movement, replication, and recovery Design lifecycle management capabilities that keep data durable, available, and cost-effective Evolve the federation layer that unifies multiple backend systems behind a simple interface Improve performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platform Collaborate closely with researchers and infrastructure teams to support rapidly evolving workloads You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience building or operating distributed systems in production Have worked on storage infrastructure, object stores, dist

About the Team Data Platform at OpenAI owns the foundational data stack powering critical product, research, and analytics workflows. We operate some of the largest Spark compute fleets in production; design, and build data lakes and metadata systems on Iceberg and Delta with a vision toward exabyte-scale architecture; 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. Join us to build and operate these core platforms that underpin OpenAI products, research, and analytics. We’re not just scaling infrastructure – we’re redefining how people interact with data. Our vision includes intelligent interfaces and AI-assisted workflows that make working with data faster, more reliable, and more intuitive. About the Role This role focuses on building and operating data infrastructure that supports massive compute fleets and storage systems, designed for high performance and scalability. You’ll help 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, build and operate low latency data ingestions, 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 wee

About the Team The Core Services team is responsible for building and managing foundational services. It acts as the bridge between core infrastructure (e.g. compute, storage, networking) and product engineering teams, and enables product teams to move fast, build reliably, and scale efficiently. About the Role As a software engineer in the core services team, you will design and operate critical backend platforms such as caching systems, workflow orchestration, metadata stores, and file services. You’ll focus on building highly reliable, scalable, and performant systems that serve as the backbone of our products. We’re looking for people who are passionate about building infrastructure that empowers product teams, love working on distributed systems challenges, and enjoy creating well-designed APIs and abstractions that accelerate development. 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. In this role, you will: Design, build, and maintain shared infrastructure services such as caching layers, workflow orchestration (Temporal), metadata stores, and file storage services. Collaborate with product teams to provide scalable, reliable primitives that abstract the complexities of distributed systems. Improve performance, resilience, and scalability of core services that power customer-facing applications. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience with distributed systems, caching infrastructure (e.g., Redis, Memcached), metadata storage (e.g., FoundationDB), or workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal, Cadence). Have experience running containerized services in cloud environments and integrating them into automated build/test/release (CI/CD) workflows. Understand trade-offs in consistency models, replication strategies, and performance optimization in multi-region systems. Excel at communication and collaboration with cross-functional teams, and are obsesse