Distributed Systems Engineer Data Platform Delivery Database Retrieval in San Francisco

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 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

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. THE ROLE Baseten is building its own GPU infrastructure for large-scale inference. As we move into large scale, high-density NVIDIA systems, the hardest failures are intermittent, cross-layer, and difficult to prove: RoCE congestion, InfiniBand stalls, ECN/DCQCN mis-tuning, bad optics, RNIC issues, host kernel stalls, GPU driver problems, and workload symptoms that look like network problems, but are not. We are hiring a Lead Software Engineer to build a first-class observability and root-cause analysis system for GPU fabrics. This is a hard distributed systems problem, not a dashboarding problem. The system will collect high-volume signals from switches, hosts, active probes, and inference services; reduce and correlate them in real time; understand topology and service ownership; and produce actionable diagnosis while an incident is still unfolding. This role sits at the boundary between networking and inference software. RDMA data paths, GPUDirect transfers, prefill/decode disaggregation, KV cache movement, request routing, and workload backpressure can all create fabric symptoms or hide real fabric failures. The goal is to tell an operator, quickly and with evidence, whether an incident is caused by the fabric, host, NIC, GPU, RDMA path, scheduler, or serving layer — and what to do next. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Real-time telemetry engine — Build the ingestion, reduction, storage, and query path for high-cardinality fab

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. We are the Data Foundation & AI team within Plaid’s Data organization. Our mission is to build the shared ML and AI infrastructure that powers intelligent capabilities across Plaid’s product suite. We develop the foundational systems, models, and data assets that transform Plaid’s unique financial network data into scalable, general-purpose representations that teams across the company can leverage. Our work spans the full ML lifecycle — from large-scale data curation and model pretraining to production serving, evaluation, and monitoring. As part of the team, you’ll work at the intersection of machine learning infrastructure, applied AI, and distributed systems, helping establish the core AI platform that enables innovation across Plaid. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will lead the technical strategy and development of Plaid’s foundation models, driving key decisions across pretraining objectives, model architecture, and fine-tuning approaches that power a wide range of downstream product applications. You will serve as the technical lead for the full machine learning lifecycle, overseeing everything from data curation and experimentation to production deployment, feature management,

About Taskrabbit: Taskrabbit is a marketplace platform that conveniently connects people with Taskers to handle everyday home to-do’s, such as furniture assembly, handyman work, moving help, and much more. At Taskrabbit, we want to transform lives one task at a time. As a company we celebrate innovation, inclusion and hard work. Our culture is collaborative, pragmatic, and fast-paced. We’re looking for talented, entrepreneurially minded and data-driven people who also have a passion for helping people do what they love. Together with IKEA, we’re creating more opportunities for people to earn a consistent, meaningful income on their own terms by building lasting relationships with clients in communities around the world. Taskrabbit is a hybrid company with employees distributed across the US and EU and a Built In — Best Places to Work (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) continually ranked across multiple national and regional categories. Join us at Taskrabbit, where your work will be meaningful, your ideas valued, and your potential unleashed! Prior to applying please note: W e are currently unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position (including H-1B, OPT, or other employment-based visas). Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States without employer sponsorship now or in the future. This role is hybrid requiring 2 days in office at our San Francisco hub every Tuesday & Wednesday (located at 130 Sutter St). About the Role Machine Learning is a cornerstone at Taskrabbit, and we’re looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to take technical ownership of our core ranking system. Every job request on the platform flows through it, making this one of the most consequential ML systems we run. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll operate as the primary architect and engineer for the ranking system — defining the system direction, driving the roadmap, solving the hardest problems, and creating leverage for the engi

About Taskrabbit: Taskrabbit is a marketplace platform that conveniently connects people with Taskers to handle everyday home to-do’s, such as furniture assembly, handyman work, moving help, and much more. At Taskrabbit, we want to transform lives one task at a time. As a company we celebrate innovation, inclusion and hard work. Our culture is collaborative, pragmatic, and fast-paced. We’re looking for talented, entrepreneurially minded and data-driven people who also have a passion for helping people do what they love. Together with IKEA, we’re creating more opportunities for people to earn a consistent, meaningful income on their own terms by building lasting relationships with clients in communities around the world. Taskrabbit is a hybrid company with employees distributed across the US and EU and a Built In — Best Places to Work (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) continually ranked across multiple national and regional categories. Join us at Taskrabbit, where your work will be meaningful, your ideas valued, and your potential unleashed! This role operates on a hybrid schedule requiring two days of in-office collaboration per week. The position must be based in the San Francisco Bay Area. About the Role We're hiring a Software Engineer II within our Fulfillment organization — the backend systems that get the right job to the right Tasker and see it through to completion. You'll join Fulfillment Lifecycle, the team that decides how jobs are matched to Taskers for our partner and marketplace business, increasingly using unstructured data and experimentation to make matching smarter and fulfillment more reliable. The team is part of a company-wide platform modernization effort, breaking a legacy monolith into well-bounded, API-first services. We're hiring for a strong backend engineer who thrives on complex, data-intensive problems, is comfortable with ambiguity, and takes pride in well-tested, observable, production-ready code. What You'll Work On B

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 Training Runtime designs the core distributed machine-learning training runtime that powers everything from early research experiments to frontier-scale model runs. With a dual mandate to accelerate researchers and enable frontier scale, we’re building a unified, modular runtime that meets researchers where they are and moves with them up the scaling curve. Our work focuses on three pillars: high-performance, asynchronous, zero-copy tensor and optimizer-state-aware data movement; performant, high-uptime, fault-tolerant training frameworks (training loop, state management, resilient checkpointing, deterministic orchestration, and observability); and distributed process management for long-lived, job-specific and user-provided processes. We integrate proven large-scale capabilities into a composable, developer-facing runtime so teams can iterate quickly and run reliably at any scale, partnering closely with model-stack, research, and platform teams. Success for us is measured by raising both training throughput (how fast models train) and researcher throughput (how fast ideas become experiments and products). About the Role As a Training Performance Engineer, you’ll drive efficiency improvements across our distributed training stack. You’ll analyze large-scale training runs, identify utilization gaps, and design optimizations that push the boundaries of throughput and uptime. This role blends deep systems understanding with practical performance engineering — analyzing GPU kernel performance, collective communication throughput, investigating I/O bottlenecks, and sharding our models so we can train them at massive scale. You’ll help ensure that our clusters are running at peak performance, enabling OpenAI to train larger, more capable models with the same compute budget. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Profil

🚀 About WRITER WRITER is where the world's leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And we're proving it's possible – through powerful, trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITER's end-to-end platform, hundreds of companies like Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their company's data and fueled by WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI. Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and London, our team thinks big and moves fast, and we're looking for smart, hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI. 📐 About the role Join WRITER's security team as a staff detection and response engineer and help protect the AI infrastructure that's transforming how the world works. You'll build sophisticated detection systems that identify attacks targeting our AI platform, training data, and model deployments while creating automated response capabilities that scale with our explosive growth. This isn't just traditional security work – you're defending cutting-edge AI/AGI systems against adversaries who are evolving their tactics as fast as AI itself advances. This role combines hands-on security engineering with strategic thinking to stay ahead of novel threats that don't exist in textbooks yet. You'll be the operational arm of our security function, translating threat intelligence into real-time detections, coordinating incident response across multiple teams, and hunting for sophisticated attacks across GPU clusters and distributed training environments. If you're excited by the challen

🚀 About WRITER WRITER is where the world's leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And we're proving it's possible – through powerful, trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITER's end-to-end platform, hundreds of companies like Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their company's data and fueled by WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI. Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and London, our team thinks big and moves fast, and we're looking for smart, hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI. 📐 About the role Join WRITER's security team as a staff detection and response engineer and help protect the AI infrastructure that's transforming how the world works. You'll build sophisticated detection systems that identify attacks targeting our AI platform, training data, and model deployments while creating automated response capabilities that scale with our explosive growth. This isn't just traditional security work – you're defending cutting-edge AI/AGI systems against adversaries who are evolving their tactics as fast as AI itself advances. This role combines hands-on security engineering with strategic thinking to stay ahead of novel threats that don't exist in textbooks yet. You'll be the operational arm of our security function, translating threat intelligence into real-time detections, coordinating incident response across multiple teams, and hunting for sophisticated attacks across GPU clusters and distributed training environments. If you're excited by the challen

🚀 About WRITER WRITER is where the world's leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And we're proving it's possible – through powerful, trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITER's end-to-end platform, hundreds of companies like Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their company's data and fueled by WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI. Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and London, our team thinks big and moves fast, and we're looking for smart, hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI. 📐 About the role Join WRITER's security team as a staff detection and response engineer and help protect the AI infrastructure that's transforming how the world works. You'll build sophisticated detection systems that identify attacks targeting our AI platform, training data, and model deployments while creating automated response capabilities that scale with our explosive growth. This isn't just traditional security work – you're defending cutting-edge AI/AGI systems against adversaries who are evolving their tactics as fast as AI itself advances. This role combines hands-on security engineering with strategic thinking to stay ahead of novel threats that don't exist in textbooks yet. You'll be the operational arm of our security function, translating threat intelligence into real-time detections, coordinating incident response across multiple teams, and hunting for sophisticated attacks across GPU clusters and distributed training environments. If you're excited by the challen

About the Team The Monetization team is a new cross-functional group working across engineering, product, research, and design to build the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. Our mission is to develop user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products—including next-generation ads experiences—that strengthen user trust, unlock economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation. Monetization plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to continue pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities while ensuring the benefits of AGI are broadly shared. We believe monetization must be aligned with user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem of developers and businesses. This team operates in a greenfield environment and moves quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to bring research breakthroughs into real-world systems at global scale. About the Role We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help build the machine learning infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems. In this foundational role, you’ll design and develop the platform layer that enables teams to build, train, deploy, serve, monitor, and continuously improve machine learning models used across advertising and monetization products. You’ll work across the full ML lifecycle, from large-scale data pipelines and feature infrastructure to training systems, model serving, experimentation platforms, and monitoring frameworks. The systems you build will support high-throughput, low-latency advertising workloads while maintaining strict standards for reliability, privacy, security, and performance. This role sits at the intersection of machine learning systems, distributed infrastructure, and monetization, offering the opportunity to shape the core platforms that help translate model innovation into m

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to architect and build backend systems that enforce data privacy and automate compliance at scale. You’ll work closely with product, infrastructure, security, and legal teams to embed privacy-by-design into our data and access layers. This is a hands-on, high-impact role for an experienced engineer who is passionate about protecting user data while enabling innovation. What You’ll Do Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce policy-driven data access, lifecycle controls, and privacy protections. Develop distributed authorization and identity-aware enforcement mechanisms integrated directly into data services and control planes. Implement auditability, policy hooks, and enforcement observability to ensure compliance is continuously verifiable. Partner with Security, Legal, and Compliance to convert privacy requirements into scalable technical designs and developer-friendly APIs. Harden data platforms and backend services through schema-level controls and data handling constraints by default. Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure consistent enforcement across systems while minimizing duplicated implementations. Contribute patterns, libraries, and education that elevate trustworthy data access patterns across the organization. You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have 5+ years of industry experience building and operating backend or infrastructure systems in production. Strong software engineering fundamentals , with fluency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, C++, Java). Experience with distributed authorization, RBAC/ACL systems, encryption-based access, or policy engines. Familiarity with global privacy regulations and their architectural implications. Ability to influence and collaborate with teams across legal, compliance, product, and engineering. A bias toward practical, impactful solutions that balance privacy protections with product needs. Nice to Have Experience wi

About the Team Compute Foundations builds the software that manages OpenAI’s GPU compute infrastructure across sites, data centers, and infrastructure providers, supporting model training and inference. Our systems turn large, heterogeneous fleets of machines into dependable compute for research and products. We build Kubernetes-based control planes, controllers, services, and APIs that coordinate the lifecycle of machines and clusters. We connect global infrastructure management with the realities of bare-metal systems, giving clients consistent interfaces across differences in hardware, topology, and provider behavior. About the Role You will build distributed systems that provision, configure, and manage compute throughout its lifecycle. Your work will connect global services and Kubernetes controllers with the systems that bring machines online, update them safely, and recover them when something goes wrong. This role combines software architecture with an understanding of how machines and data centers work. You might design a lifecycle API, improve controller performance under high concurrency and provider rate limits, or trace a provisioning failure from an API through reconciliation to network boot or host configuration. You will help these systems remain reliable as the fleet expands across sites and generations of GPU hardware. We value depth in relevant systems and the ability to connect layers. You do not need to arrive as an expert in every component of the stack. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate Kubernetes-based controllers and distributed services that coordinate infrastructure across sites, isolate failures, and scale as GPU capacity grows. Define APIs and resource models that let clients request and track lifecycle operations through consistent interfaces across hardware platforms and providers. Build provisioning and configuration services that coordinate network boot, hardware management interfaces, and the deployment of firmware,

About the Team The Core Services organization builds and runs the mission-critical online services that product teams rely on in production. We own foundational distributed systems and platform capabilities that enable reliable execution, high-performance services, and large-scale file/data needs across our products. This team is distinct from developer infrastructure and data infrastructure—our focus is production service foundations and core runtime services. About the Role We’re hiring an Engineering Manager, Core Services to help lead teams responsible for highly reliable, high-scale distributed systems that sit on the critical path for OpenAI products. Your team will own foundational production systems that OpenAI’s product engineering teams build on. You’ll collaborate closely with product and infrastructure partners to ship reliable services quickly, and help scale systems and teams as OpenAI grows. You’ll partner closely with senior engineering leaders to scale the org, mature operations, and drive major platform initiatives. This role requires strong technical ability. You’ll be responsible for: Managing and growing a high-performing team of infrastructure engineers. Leading teams building and operating large, critical production platforms, including cluster reliability, scaling, and rollout safety. Building and operating mission-critical distributed systems with strong operational rigor (SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, reliability). Setting technical direction for platform foundations such as workflow/orchestration capabilities, large-scale file/blob/storage services, and core service foundations. Partnering with a broad set of stakeholders, including product engineering, adjacent infrastructure teams, and (where relevant) finance/cost partners. Coaching, mentoring, and developing engineers and emerging leaders. You might thrive in this role if you: Have significant experience leading teams that run mission-critical infrastructure in production