Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems - Robotics

About the Team The OpenAI Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role As a Research Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design and scale the infrastructure that powers large-scale multimodal training and evaluation at OpenAI. You’ll manage distributed data pipelines, collaborate closely with researchers to translate requirements into robust systems, and harden pipelines that serve as the backbone for OpenAI's rapid iteration cycles. We’re looking for engineers who are detail-oriented, have strong experience with distributed systems, and excel at building reliable infrastructure in high-stakes environments. 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 data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, machine learning infrastructure while ensuring scalability, reliability, and security. Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient. Partner with researchers to deeply understand requirements and translate them into production-ready systems. Harden, optimize, and maintain critical data infrastructure systems that power multimodal training and evaluation. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong experience with distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure with a strong interest in data. Are detail-oriented and bring rigor to building and maintaining reliable systems. Demonstrate excellent software enginee

What you’ll do Act as the technical lead for large parts of the scanner platform: system architecture, codebase structure, and long-term maintainability. Own core runtime foundations: distributed control, state management, fault handling, and reliability. Drive engineering rigor: testability, code quality, review standards, performance regression prevention, and release processes. Build robust observability: logs, metrics, traces, and replayable diagnostics (with privacy constraints). Collaborate with hardware and recon/ML teams to define interfaces, data contracts, timing/synchronization, and failure modes. Lead complex refactors (e.g., message passing / RPC boundaries, modularization, concurrency model) without halting forward progress. What we’re looking for Deep software architecture experience for real-world systems: robotics, instrumentation, medical devices, or other complex distributed products. Strong Python and concurrency background (asyncio, multiprocessing, profiling, performance engineering). Track record of shipping systems that are observable, debuggable, and resilient. Strong technical leadership: clarity, pragmatic trade-offs, and mentoring. Useful experience Building but rock-solid systems: clear interfaces (gRPC/protobuf or equivalent), strong state modeling, and failure handling. High-leverage engineering habits on a lean team: good tests, CI, reproducible dev environments, and fast code review. Practical performance + concurrency work in Python (asyncio, profiling, multiprocessing) and comfort debugging distributed behavior. Security-minded device software: safe defaults, encrypted data paths, and disciplined handling of PII/PHI. Operational thinking: remote updates/management, excellent logging, and diagnostics that make real hardware debuggable.

About the Team: The Database Systems team specializes in high-performance distributed databases. Our team built Rockset, the real-time search, analytics, and vector database that powers all vector search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at OpenAI. In addition to retrieval, as an online database, Rockset powers core functionality across all of OpenAI's product lines and many critical internal use cases. About the Role : We are looking for engineers passionate about distributed systems, close-to-the-metal performance optimization (our core engine is written in C++), and building scalable database infrastructure from the ground up. As an engineer on the Database Systems team, you'll contribute to the core database engine, driving improvements across ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. You'll partner with teams across OpenAI to unlock new product capabilities and help scale online database reliability and throughput as usage grows by orders of magnitude. In this role you will: Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks to scale infrastructure to the next order of magnitude Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams to deliver scalable and reliable infrastructure Dig deep into complex production issues across the stack Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and best practices for system reliability You might thrive in this role if you: Have significant experience building, scaling, and optimizing distributed systems at scale Are curious about database internals, storage engines, or low-latency query systems Enjoy debugging challenging performance issues in complex, high-throughput systems Have experience operating production clusters at scale (e.g., Kubernetes or other orchestration systems) Think rigorously about scalability, correctness, and reliability Thrive in fast-paced environments with high

Overview: The Data Acquisition team within the Foundations organization at OpenAI is responsible for all aspects of data collection to support our model training operations. Our team manages web crawling and GPTBot services and works closely with Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling teams. We are looking for a skilled Software Engineer to join our Data Acquisition team. Responsibilities: Own and lead engineering projects in the area of data acquisition including web crawling, data ingestion, and search. Collaborate with other sub-teams, such as Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling, to ensure smooth data flow and system operability. Work closely with the legal team to handle any compliance or data privacy-related matters. Develop and deploy highly scalable distributed systems capable of handling petabytes of data. Architect and implement algorithms for data indexing and search capabilities. Build and maintain backend services for data storage, including work with key-value databases and synchronization. Deploy solutions in a Kubernetes Infrastructure-as-Code environment and perform routine system checks. Conduct and analyze experiments on data to provide insights into system performance. Qualifications: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field. 4+ years of industry experience in software development. Experience with large web crawlers a plus Strong expertise in large stateful distributed systems and data processing. Proficiency in Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code concepts. Willingness and enthusiasm for trying new approaches and technologies. Ability to handle multiple tasks and adapt to changing priorities. Strong communication skills, both written and verbal. 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 to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. At Baseten, we are building the global operating system for distributed, heterogeneous AI hardware. We believe that as LLM and multi-modal workloads scale, the network is the computer. We are looking for foundational engineers to lead our GPU Networking efforts, making RDMA a first-class building block in our infrastructure and unlocking the next generation of distributed inference optimizations. THE OPPORTUNITY Networking and compute are no longer separate disciplines; they are converging. The massive throughput of H100, B200, and NVL72 architectures enables and demands a new approach where communication is co-optimized alongside computation. We are entering an era where the network is an active accelerator, leveraging smart hardware offloads and direct interconnects to ensure that data movement operates at wire-speed. In this role, you will go beyond network configuration to architect the software fabric that unifies thousands of GPUs into a cohesive operating system. While you will leverage the best of the open-source ecosystem, you won't be limited by it. Where off-the-shelf solutions stop, you will build from scratch, engineering the primitives required to co-optimize communication and compute for Disaggregated Serving, Wide Expert Parallelism (WideEP), and lightening cold starts. WHAT YOU'LL DO Make RDMA First-Class: You will work on integrating RDMA/RoCE/InfiniBand capabilities directly into our inference stack,

About the Team The Workload team is responsible for designing and running OpenAI’s LLM training and inference infrastructure that powers frontier models at massive scale. Our systems unify how researchers train and serve models, abstracting away the complexity of performance, parallelism, and execution across vast GPU/accelerator fleets. By providing this foundation, the Workload team ensures that researchers can focus on advancing model capabilities while we handle the scale, efficiency, and reliability required to bring those models to life. About the Role We are looking for an engineer to design and implement the dataset infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s next-generation training stack. You will be responsible for building standardized dataset interfaces, scaling pipelines across thousands of GPUs, and proactively testing performance bottlenecks. In this role, you will collaborate closely with the multimodal researchers, and other infra groups to ensure datasets are unified, efficient, and easy to consume. In this role, you will: Design and maintain standardized dataset APIs, including for multimodal (MM) data that cannot fit in memory. Build proactive testing and scale validation pipelines for dataset loading at GPU scale. Collaborate with teammates to integrate datasets seamlessly into training and inference pipelines, ensuring smooth adoption and a great user experience. Document and maintain dataset interfaces so they are discoverable, consistent, and easy for other teams to adopt. Establish safeguards and validation systems to ensure datasets remain reproducible and unchanged once standardized. Debug and resolve performance bottlenecks in distributed dataset loading (e.g., straggler systems slowing global training). Provide visualization and inspection tools to surface errors, bugs, or bottlenecks in datasets. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong engineering fundamentals with experience in distributed systems, data pipelines, or infrastructure.