About the Team OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. The API Platform turns frontier research into reliable capabilities that developers use to build transformative products and services for people around the world. API Safety's goal is to ensure safe deployment of frontier models in the API. We design APIs and systems that help developers share usage context, understand safety events, and apply safeguards tailored to the risk profile of the applications they are building. This work is critical to our frontier model launches and partners closely with teams across API, Integrity, and Safety Research. About the Role We're looking for product-minded software engineers to join a team that is addressing emerging risks at the frontier of model development while building novel solutions for real-world AI deployment. The day-to-day work ranges from solving production challenges to designing new product experiences and safeguards. The right candidate is comfortable balancing tradeoffs across developer experience, latency, reliability, and risk. In this role, you will: Design and build dashboards and APIs for safety controls and customer-facing observability. Develop scalable systems that extend trusted safety capabilities to new use cases, customers, and deployment environments. Partner with Safety Research and Integrity to build safeguards that mitigate emerging risks. Be responsible for the availability, latency, and scalability of safeguards across high-volume API traffic. Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while raising the team’s engineering standards Your background might look something like: 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles. A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems. Strong s
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Ai Systems Engineer in San Francisco
1,456 active opportunities · Updated October 2026
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Explore current ai systems engineer jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
$157.1K – $194K/yr
Drata is building the trust layer between great companies - automating compliance, managing risk, and helping organizations prove trust continuously as they scale. We're Dratanauts: a global crew of 600+ professionals united by a culture that rewards integrity, ownership, and raising the bar, no matter where in the world we're working from. Why Join the Drata Team? At Drata, you're not maintaining legacy compliance software - you're building the agentic AI platform defining what trust looks like for the next generation of companies. Here's what makes the work itself worth showing up for: Problems without a playbook: You'll work at the edge of AI and security, building agentic governance, continuous compliance, and real-time trust verification to solve problems that don't have an established answer yet. You're writing it as you go. Real ownership, not just process: Our values center on owning outcomes and raising the bar, not checking boxes. You're expected to have opinions and back them. A seat at the table: Your perspective is unique and valued. Open debate and diverse viewpoints are built into how decisions actually get made here, at every level. Growth at rocketship speed: Drata is scaling fast, which means scope grows fast too. High performers get more ownership, visibility, and experience. A crew, not just coworkers: Dratanauts consistently describe a "come as you are" culture with sharp, curious people—the kind of team that makes hard problems genuinely fun to solve. See what they say here and follow us on LinkedIn for company news, employee stories, and career updates. Job Summary: As a member of the IT team, you will play an important role in helping Drata scale securely and thoughtfully as we grow. You’ll build, secure, and continuously improve the systems and processes that power our internal operations across identity and access management, device management, network security, SaaS administration, and workflow automation. This is a great opportunity for s
$155K – $400K/yr
About Sentry Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building. Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future. About the role The Events Analytics Platform (EAP) team is responsible for the infrastructure that powers all of Sentry's time-series data and searching capabilities across billions of events with sub-second latency. We started this initiative by building Snuba, the primary storage and query service for Sentry's event data powered by ClickHouse, and we are now focused on unlocking deeper visibility and reporting across the terabytes of event data our users generate. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will lead efforts to push the boundaries of data visibility at Sentry. You will do this by expanding the capabilities of our search infrastructure, building new capabilities on top of our state-of-the-art storage layer and increasing the performance and integrity of Sentry’s core data services. You will also help shape Infrastructure's technical direction at Sentry and collaborate with Product and other Engineering teams to turn that vision into a reality. If you want to solve the hard problems that come with scaling event data into the petabyte range, this could be the job for you. In this role you will: Expand EAP's ability to deliver data at world-class speed and reliability. Architect and automate services and systems to scale reliably under growing demand. Make architectural trade-offs that balance product requirements with engineering constraints. Maintain and grow the team's code quality initiatives by regularly reviewing code and contributing to design decisions. Lead design and discussions around deliverables the team is working towards. Improve the maintainability and developer experience of the codebases EAP owns. Exa
$220K – $450K/yr
About Sentry Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building. Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future. About the role Sentry's Infrastructure Engineering team is what makes operating Sentry simple, safe, and seamless for every other engineering team in the company. They build the internal control platforms, configuration systems, traffic routing, and automation that let product engineers operate services safely at scale without needing deep infrastructure expertise themselves. As the Engineering Manager for Infrastructure Engineering, you'll lead a team of engineers building the tools that power Sentry's growth: internal admin and change management tools, configuration automation, and the routing layer that underlies Sentry's architecture. You'll be responsible for technical vision, team health, system reliability, and partnership with engineering teams across the company who depend on your team's tools every day. You'll work closely with leaders across Infrastructure, Platform, and Production Engineering to shape how Sentry scales its operational model as the company grows. In this role you will Lead a team of engineers building the internal control platforms that every engineering team at Sentry relies on to operate services safely. Drive the evolution of Infrastructure Engineering's platform, including configuration management, traffic routing and environment controls Own the team's technical direction, contributing to key decisions on API architecture, internal tooling design, and automation frameworks. Nurture and grow engineers at different levels, providing support through coaching, mentorship, and career development. Foster an inclusive, high-performing team culture focused on ownership, learning, and delivery. Partne
We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. Plaid’s mission is to unlock financial freedom for everyone by making money movement and access to financial data simple and secure. As a Software Engineer, you will design and build the systems that power how millions of people connect to their finances. You will work across the stack, from reliable backend services and APIs to intuitive applications that bring those systems to life. You will collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers to ship products that make financial services more accessible and transparent. At Plaid, engineers take ownership early, grow quickly, and see their work reach millions of users. Responsibilities: Design & Development: Build and maintain backend services with a focus on performance, reliability and scalability. Collaboration: Work closely with product managers and other stakeholders to define and implement new features that meet product and customer needs. Code Quality: Write clean, maintainable and efficient code. Testing & Debugging: Develop automated tests to ensure the quality and reliability of the codebase. Troubleshoot and resolve issues. Engage in hands-on coding and architectural design, setting and maintaining high technical standard
We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. Making data driven decisions is key to Plaid's culture. To support that, we need to scale our data systems while maintaining correct and complete data. We provide tooling and guidance to teams across engineering, product, and business and help them explore our data quickly and safely to get the data insights they need, which ultimately helps Plaid serve our customers more effectively. Engineers on Data Infrastructure are domain experts in Data Warehouse, Data Lakehouse, Spark, Workflow Orchestration, and Streaming technologies. We scale our existing data pipelines in a performant and cost efficient way while creating the necessary abstractions to make developing on top of this platform extremely simple for other engineers at Plaid. Responsibilities Contribute towards the long-term technical roadmap for data-driven and machine learning iteration at Plaid Leading key data infrastructure projects such as improving ML development golden paths, implementing offline streaming solutions for data freshness, building net new ETL pipeline infrastructure, and evolving data warehouse or data lakehouse capabilities. Working with stakeholders in other teams and functions to define technical roadmaps for key backe
We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. The Data Governance team makes sure Plaid handles consumer and customer data responsibly — and can prove it. Our mission is to enforce Plaid's privacy commitments and regulatory obligations in the systems themselves rather than in policy documents: we build the platform and controls that govern how data flows through Plaid — where it lives, who can use it, for what purpose, and for how long. That includes verifiable deletion of consumer data on request, enforcement of data-use restrictions so downstream systems can only use data in permitted ways, and the cataloging and classification that let Plaid know what data it holds and how sensitive it is. We operate at the scale of Plaid's entire data footprint, and correctness and auditability matter to us as much as throughput. As a Staff Software Engineer on Data Governance, you will set the technical direction for how Plaid enforces data governance at scale. You'll lead the design of distributed backend systems that reliably delete, restrict, and track data across dozens of services, making architectural decisions whose blast radius spans the whole company. You'll drive multi-quarter initiatives from ambiguous privacy and regulatory requirements through
We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. Making data-driven decisions is key to Plaid's culture. To support that, we need to scale our data systems while maintaining correct and complete data. We provide golden datasets and tooling to teams across engineering, product, and business and help them explore our data quickly and safely to get the data insights they need, which ultimately helps Plaid serve our customers more effectively. In addition, Plaid will not be successful if we can't move quickly. We build the data systems and tools that enable everyone at Plaid to be data-driven, making analytics easy, obvious, and proactive across the company. Data Engineers heavily leverage SQL and Python to build data workflows that integrate with our Golang applications. We use tools like DBT, Airflow, Redshift, Atlan, and Retool to orchestrate data pipelines and define workflows. We work with engineers, product managers, business intelligence, data analysts, and many other teams to build Plaid's data strategy and a data-first mindset. You will be in a high impact role that will directly enable business leaders to make faster and more informed business judgements based on the datasets you build. You will have the opportunity to carve out the ownershi
About the Team API Multimodal builds the developer-facing products and infrastructure that bring OpenAI’s image, audio, and real-time model capabilities into the world. We are responsible for high-scale APIs for image generation, speech transcription, speech generation, and low-latency voice interactions. We partner closely with Research and Inference to bring frontier model capabilities to developers and use customer feedback to improve our models. About the Role As a software engineer on API Multimodal, you will build and operate the products and distributed systems behind OpenAI’s image, audio, and real-time APIs. You will work across model integration, API design, and production infrastructure to turn new research capabilities into reliable developer experiences. This hands-on role combines backend and systems depth with product judgment: you will own projects end to end, partner with Research, Inference, and Safety, and help make multimodal AI useful at scale. Model training experience is not required. In this role, you will: Design, build, and ship developer-facing APIs and backend services that serve frontier models. Architect low-latency streaming, request, session, and model integration systems that make complex multimodal interactions reliable and intuitive at scale. Work directly with Research to bring new model capabilities into production, shape the systems around them, and incorporate feedback from real-world developers and customers. Own the availability, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency of the services you build. Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while raising the team’s engineering standards. Your background might look something like: 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles. A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed syste
About the Team The Post-Training Frontiers team is responsible for training the frontier agents OpenAI ships to the world (GPT-Next). We train the flagship agentic models behind Codex, ChatGPT, and the API through large-scale reinforcement learning. The team’s work spans four areas. First, execution and science: working with teams across OpenAI to decide what can go into the final model and how, using scientific experiments and evals that are representative of the final pipeline so issues can be recognized early. Second, RL scaling: executing the final large-scale reinforcement learning run, making sure GPUs are used efficiently and training stays healthy. Third, research: improving horizontal capabilities like instruction following, factuality, memory, and multi-agent behavior, where the team’s broad visibility helps identify cross-cutting improvements across teams and domains. Fourth, engineering: maintaining the infrastructure stack and internal tools to ensure that both the final run and all integrations go as smoothly as possible and that the systems are easy to work with. About the Role This role focuses on keeping our frontier RL training runs fast, reliable, and unblocked. You will work across engineering and infrastructure problems as they emerge, from scaling and orchestration issues to inference bottlenecks, numerical problems, and hardware failures, as well as supporting large horizontal integrations in the big run, like multi-agent capabilities or memory. This is a role for a strong generalist who quickly learns anything needed for the task, has high attention to detail, debugs deeply, and is motivated by fixing the highest-impact problem in front of the team. In this role, you will: Keep large-scale async RL training runs moving by jumping into the most urgent engineering and infrastructure problems. Debug issues across training systems, inference, orchestration, scaling, and distributed infrastructure. Improve the reliability and efficiency of RL trai
About the Team OpenAI’s API Multicloud team is responsible for extending OpenAI’s API platform into strategic cloud environments, starting with AWS . The team’s mission is to distribute OpenAI’s API broadly and safely by enabling key API technologies in cloud-native environments, in close partnership with Amazon and internal teams across Codex, Research, Safety Systems, and Applied. The team is focused on bringing core developer and enterprise capabilities into cloud-native environments, including cloud-hosted Codex, model customization / post-training as a service, and new stateful runtime environments for agentic workloads. This work sits at the intersection of production ML systems, developer platforms, model behavior, and large-scale infrastructure. About the Role We’re looking for a backend engineer who can quickly understand OpenAI’s models, products, and systems, then adapt first-party deployments for other cloud platforms. You’ll build backend services, APIs, SDK integrations, authentication flows, and cloud service infrastructure that let developers use OpenAI capabilities in the cloud environments where they already build. This role involves working across teams, sometimes embedded with partner product groups, to ship products quickly and across multiple platforms at the same time. It’s a strong fit for engineers who have built developer tools, especially AI-powered tools, communicate clearly across technical boundaries, and can shape architectures that support different deployment models; experience building cloud services is a strong plus. In this role, you will: Build backend and infrastructure systems that extend OpenAI’s API platform into cloud-native environments, like AWS. Design and ship cloud-contained products that allow customers to use OpenAI capabilities while keeping workloads and data within cloud environments. Help stand up cloud-hosted Codex experiences powered by the OpenAI Responses API. Build the infrastructure and runtime abstractions
About the Team Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security team protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products. We are technical in what we build but are operational in how we do our work, and are committed to supporting all products and research at OpenAI. Our Security team tenets include: prioritizing for impact, enabling researchers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and engaging a robust security culture. About the Role We are seeking a Software Engineer, Security Observability to join our Security team. In this role, you will be responsible for building secure, scalable systems that enhance our security observability infrastructure. Leveraging your strong engineering skills, you will collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop, deploy, and maintain robust software solutions that support our security and detection capabilities. This role is open to remote employees, or relocation assistance is available to one of our OpenAI offices in San Francisco, Seattle, or New York City. Due to requirements associated with work this role may support, applicants for this position must be U.S. citizens. In this role, you will: Design and develop scalable software systems that facilitate security observability across our infrastructure. Build and maintain data pipelines that centralize and store security-relevant data from diverse sources. Proactively improve the resilience and reliability of data systems to ensure high platform availability Collaborate closely with Detection & Response (D&R) and other security teams to reduce the company’s security risk. Contribute to data engineering in support of forensic investigations and compliance efforts. You might thrive in this role if you have: Strong software engineering experience, with proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Golang, or similar. A background in infrastructure as code, with exp
About the Team Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Identity Infrastructure Engineering team sits at the core of this effort, designing and building the identity and access management solutions that protect our model weights, customer data, and critical systems across multiple cloud environments. We partner with teams across OpenAI—Applied Engineering, Research, IT, and Security—to provide a secure and scalable platform for permissioning, orchestration, and innovative AI research. About the Role We’re looking for a Staff+ Software Engineer to help build and evolve the identity infrastructure that supports OpenAI’s research, engineering, and internal platforms. This role sits at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, identity systems, and software engineering. You’ll work across production systems, infrastructure-as-code, cloud control planes, identity providers, and operational infrastructure to build secure, scalable, and reliable systems used broadly across the company. The ideal candidate has experience building and operating large-scale, mission-critical systems with strong reliability and security requirements, and is comfortable writing production code, designing distributed systems, and driving ambiguous projects from 0 to 1 while building the operational rigor needed to run critical infrastructure over time. In this role, you will: Lead the architecture, development, and operation of identity infrastructure that spans cloud platforms, internal systems, and critical engineering services. Design and evolve systems for authentication, authorization, access governance, auditability, and policy enforcement with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and secure-by-default design. Build foundational infrastructure and platform capabilities that are broadly used across engineering, research, and security teams. Improve the reliability, observability, performance, and op
This role will support the fleet infrastructure team at OpenAI. The fleet team focuses on running the world’s largest, most reliable, and frictionless GPU fleet to support OpenAI’s general purpose model training and deployment. Work on this team ranges from Maximizing GPUs doing useful work by building user-friendly scheduling and quota systems Running a reliable and low maintenance platform by building push-button automation for kubernetes cluster provisioning and upgrades Supporting research workflows with service frameworks and deployment systems Ensuring fast model startup times though high performance snapshot delivery across blob storage down to hardware caching Much more! About the Role As an engineer within Fleet infrastructure, you will design, write, deploy, and operate infrastructure systems for model deployment and training on one of the world’s largest GPU fleet. The scale is immense, the timelines are tight, and the organization is moving fast; this is an opportunity to shape a critical system in support of OpenAI's mission to advance AI capabilities responsibly. 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, implement and operate components of our compute fleet including job scheduling, cluster management, snapshot delivery, and CI/CD systems. Interface with researchers and product teams to understand workload requirements Collaborate with hardware, infrastructure, and business teams to provide a high utilization and high reliability service You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience with hyperscale compute systems Possess strong programming skills Have experience working in public clouds (especially Azure) Have experience working in Kubernetes Execution focused mentality paired with a rigorous focus on user requirements As a bonus, have an understanding of AI/ML workloads About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI resea
About the Team The Hardware Health and Observability team owns the end-to-end health lifecycle of OpenAI’s global compute fleet. Our mission is to maximize healthy, usable compute across accelerator vendors, generations, cloud providers, and regions through reliable health signals, automated remediation, and scalable operational tooling. We build the systems that observe, detect, remediate, and verify hardware issues across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure, enabling frontier model training and inference workloads to run reliably at hyperscale. We are the last line of defense for the success of OAI’s production and research workloads. About the Role On the Hardware Health and Observability team, you’ll build critical infrastructure that keeps OpenAI’s largest compute clusters healthy and operational at scale. Even small numbers of unhealthy systems can impact large-scale training and inference workloads. This team focuses on minimizing downtime, improving fleet efficiency, and ensuring compute resources remain continuously available to researchers and product teams. Engineers on this team own problems end-to-end, from defining health signals and debugging failures to building automated remediation systems that operate across millions of GPUs globally. In this role, you will: Define and maintain health signals across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure. Build and evolve health checks that detect, remediate, and verify failures at scale. Ensure critical health checks execute with minimal latency to maximize workload uptime. Investigate hardware failures and system-level issues across large-scale compute environments. Own node lifecycle workflows including drain, quarantine, repair, RMA, and return-to-service processes. Build automation and tooling that enables global cluster management with minimal manual intervention. Partner with workload, reliability, and provider teams to integrate health signals into training and inference system
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