Distributed Systems Engineer Data Platform Delivery Database Retrieval in San Francisco

By applying to this role, you will be considered for Research Engineer roles across all teams at OpenAI. About the Role As a Research Engineer here, you will be responsible for building AI systems that can perform previously impossible tasks or achieve unprecedented levels of performance. We're looking for people with solid engineering skills (for example designing, implementing, and improving a massive-scale distributed machine learning system), writing bug-free machine learning code, and building the science behind the algorithms employed. The most outstanding deep learning results are increasingly attained at a massive scale, and these results require engineers who are comfortable working in large distributed systems. We expect engineering to play a key role in most major advances in AI of the future. We expect you to: Have strong programming skills Have experience working in large distributed systems Be excited about OpenAI’s approach to research Nice to have: Interested in and thoughtful about the impacts of AI technology Past experience in creating high-performance implementations of deep learning algorithms 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 extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role On the Accelerators team, you will help OpenAI evaluate and bring up new compute platforms that can support large-scale AI training and inference. Your work will range from prototyping system software on new accelerators to enabling performance optimizations across our AI workloads. You’ll work across the stack, collaborating with both hardware and software aspects - working on kernels, sharding strategies, scaling across distributed systems, and performance modeling. You'll help adapt OpenAI's software stack to non-traditional hardware and drive efficiency improvements in core AI workloads. This is not a compiler-focused role, rather bridging ML algorithms with system performance - especially at scale. In this role, you will: Prototype and enable OpenAI's AI software stack on new, exploratory accelerator platforms. Optimize large-scale model performance (LLMs, recommender systems, distributed AI workloads) for diverse hardware environments. Develop kernels, sharding mechanisms, and system scaling strategies tailored to emerging accelerators. Collaborate on optimizations at the model code level (e.g. PyTorch) and below to enhance performance on non-traditional hardware. Perform system-level performance modeling, debug bottlenecks, and drive end-to-end optimization. Work with hardware teams and vendors to evaluate alternatives to existing platforms and adapt the software stack to their architectures. Contribute to runtime improvements, compute/communication over

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 issue platform processes billions of events every day to help millions of developers find and fix bugs. The hard part is deciding which events point to a problem, which belong together, and what a developer needs to know to investigate. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Issue Detection team, you'll design, build, and operate the systems that make those decisions. You'll work on real-time processing pipelines, monitors, and analysis systems that detect problems and turn them into issues. The work combines distributed systems with product engineering. Choices about detection accuracy and processing latency affect which problems developers see and how soon they can act. You'll help shape how developers monitor their applications and how Sentry groups related events into issues. You'll also build the context developers and AI agents need to investigate what went wrong. Keeping these systems reliable and fast as Sentry grows is part of the job, alongside making the issues they produce more useful. In this role you will Build and scale features on a product surface handling billions of events daily, where both query latency and correctness are immediately visible to users. Own the design and delivery of substantial projects end to end, scoping alongside product and design, making the technical calls within your scope, shipping, and instrumenting what you ship so the team can measure it. You will contribute to meaningful technical product decisions : grouping quality, search performance, migrations and backfills against enormous datasets, and making the surface work well for both humans and agents. Champi

About the Team The ChatGPT organization at OpenAI supports our mission by bringing advanced AI capabilities to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. The Image Generation team is responsible for one of the fastest-growing experiences in ChatGPT, enabling users to create, edit, and transform images through natural language. Recent advances in our multimodal image models have dramatically improved image quality, instruction following, editing precision, consistency, and text rendering, unlocking entirely new creative and professional workflows. We work at the intersection of research, infrastructure, and product to build the systems that power image generation at global scale. Our team partners closely with researchers, product engineers, designers, and platform teams to bring state-of-the-art image capabilities to millions of users while continuously pushing the boundaries of what AI-powered creation can do. About the Role We are looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join the Image Generation team and help build the systems that power image creation and editing across ChatGPT. You'll work on the core backend infrastructure that enables users to generate, edit, and iterate on visual content using cutting-edge multimodal AI models. This includes building highly scalable services, orchestration systems, APIs, storage platforms, and distributed infrastructure that support billions of image generations and editing workflows. You'll partner closely with product, research, and mobile teams to transform breakthrough AI capabilities into reliable, performant experiences used by millions around the world. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate backend systems that power image generation and image editing experiences in ChatGPT. Develop scalable APIs, services, and infrastructure that support multimodal AI workflows. Optimize reliability, latency, throughput, and cost across large-scale distributed systems. Partner with researchers to productionize new im

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role You will build the model runtime within the inference engine that executes complex, frontier models at scale on OpenAI’s custom silicon. The runtime will sit between models running on the hardware and the upper layers of the cluster serving software stack, translating demanding inference workloads into efficient execution while optimizing for throughput, latency, utilization, and reliability. You will work across model architecture, distributed systems, compilers, kernels, and silicon to design a production-grade runtime comparable in ambition to systems such as vLLM and SGLang, but customized and optimized for OpenAI’s AI accelerator. Your work will shape how new model capabilities map onto the platform and how quickly custom silicon can deliver meaningful performance in production. In this role, you will: Design and implement the LLM inference runtime for frontier models running on custom silicon. Build scheduling, continuous batching, memory management, KV-cache management, and execution orchestration for high-performance inference. Develop distributed execution strategies across chips, hosts, and racks, including model partitioning, communication, and synchronization. Optimize end-to-end latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and hardware utilization across diverse model architectures and serving workloads. Partner with kernel, compiler, architecture, and silicon teams to co-design interfaces and remove performance bottlenecks across the stack. Enable new

Who are we? Cohere is the leading security-first enterprise AI company. We build cutting-edge foundation AI models and end-to-end products that are designed to solve real-world business problems. We’re training and deploying frontier models for enterprises who are building AI systems. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI and we are looking for folks that want to be part of that. We obsess over what we build. Each one of us is responsible for contributing to increasing the capabilities of our models and the value they drive for our customers. Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are all passionate about their craft. We are a global technology company headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul. Join us! Why this role? Are you energized by building high-performance, scalable and reliable machine learning systems? Do you want to help define and build the next generation of AI platforms powering advanced NLP applications? We are looking for Members of Technical Staff to join the Model Serving team at Cohere. The team is responsible for developing, deploying, and operating the AI platform delivering Cohere's large language models through easy to use API endpoints. In this role, you will work closely with many teams to deploy optimized NLP models to production in low latency, high throughput, and high availability environments. You will also get the opportunity to interface with customers and create customized deployments to meet their specific needs. You may be a good fit if you have: 5+ years of engineering experience running production infrastructure at a large scale Experience designing large, highly available distributed systems with Kubernetes, and GPU workloads on those clusters Experience with Kubernetes dev and production coding and support Experience with GCP, Azure, AWS, OCI, multi-cloud on-prem / hybrid serving Experienc

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 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

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 core infrastructure behind OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems. In this foundational role, you’ll architect and implement distributed systems that power OpenAI’s monetization stack—focusing on reliability, performance, privacy, and large-scale operation. You’ll work across backend, systems, and platform layers to define and implement 0→1 infrastructure, partnering closely with Product, Design, and Research to shape the future of monetized AI experiences. Your work will enable both internal and external teams to build on safe, scalable, and robust monetization primitives. This role is exclusively based across our San Francisco & Seattles sites. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Design and build the foundational backend and infrastructure powering OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems Architect large-scale distributed systems that

About the Team The Codex Core Agent team builds the kernel of Codex. We own making the agent better, accelerating research, and making those improvements real in production for our users. That means working across the systems that make Codex actually function as an agent in the real world: the production performance envelope around tokens, latency, reliability, cost, and capacity; the core execution loop and interfaces that turn models into useful behavior; the shared infrastructure that enables other teams to build on Codex; and the feedback loops that turn real-world usage into better models and better agent behavior over time. About the Role We’re looking for engineers to build the infrastructure that powers Codex agents in production. This role focuses on the systems that let models safely execute code, interact with tools, complete long-running tasks, and operate reliably and efficiently at scale. You’ll design and operate the infrastructure behind sandboxed execution, orchestration, stateful workflows, app-server and SDK boundaries, and model rollouts. You’ll work at the intersection of distributed systems, developer tooling, and AI, building primitives that make Codex faster, safer, more reliable, and easier for the rest of the organization to build on. What You’ll Do Design and build execution environments for AI agents, including sandboxing, isolation, and reproducibility. Develop systems for agent orchestration across multi-step, tool-using workflows. Build infrastructure for running, testing, and debugging code generated by models. Create state and memory systems that allow agents to persist context across long-running tasks. Optimize tokens, latency, reliability, and cost across Codex’s production fleet. Support model rollouts, capacity planning, and the core tradeoffs between quality, speed, and economics to manage a fleet of frontier agents at scale. Build shared platform capabilities that unblock product teams, partner teams, and open source Codex. Yo

About the Team Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and analysis to understand where time and cost are spent, then turn that understanding into performance optimizations and models that project performance and capacity needs for future launches. About the Role In this role, you will model inference performance across application, model, and fleet layers with higher fidelity. You will build cost-to-serve estimates from microbenchmarks and create tools that help cross-functional teams reason about latency, capacity, utilization, and cost tradeoffs. In this role, you will Build and refine performance models that translate microbenchmark results into cost-to-serve estimates. Analyze inference workloads end to end across applications, models, and fleet infrastructure. Enhance tooling to identify bottlenecks across layers for latency and throughput. Partner with other teams to turn performance insights into concrete improvements and project how future changes affect inference. You might thrive in this role if you: Enjoy reasoning from first principles about distributed systems, model inference, and hardware efficiency. Are comfortable working across abstraction layers, from application behavior to kernels, accelerators, networking, and fleet scheduling. Have deep expertise with performance profiling, benchmarking, analysis, and optimization. Enjoy collaborating with engineering and research teams to improve real production systems. 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 extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve o

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

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’s Model Performance (MP) team is responsible for ensuring the models running on our platform are fast, reliable, and cost‑efficient. As part of this team, you’ll focus on Model APIs — the infrastructure powering our hosted API endpoints for the latest open‑source models. This work spans distributed systems, model serving, and developer experience. You’ll join a small, high‑impact team operating at the intersection of product, model performance, and infra, helping to define how developers interact with AI models at scale. RESPONSIBILITIES: Design, build, and operate the Model APIs surface with focus on advanced inference capabilities: structured outputs (JSON mode, grammar-constrained generation), tool/function calling and multi-modal serving Profile and optimize TensorRT-LLM kernels, analyze CUDA kernel performance, implement custom CUDA operators, tune memory allocation patterns for maximum throughput and optimize communication patterns across multi-GPU setups Productionize performance improvements across runtimes with deep understanding of their internals: speculative decoding implementations, guided generation for structured outputs, custom scheduling and routing algorithms for high-performance serving Build comprehensive benchmarking frameworks that measure real-world performance across different model architectures, batch sizes, sequence lengths, and hardware configurations Productionize performa

Join the engineering teams that bring OpenAI’s ideas safely to the world!! The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. About the Role We’re building the observability product for OpenAI—from scalable infrastructure to a rich, AI-powered UI. Our systems ingest over petabytes of logs and billions of time series metrics across our fleet. We're now layering intelligence on top—think agents that summarize SEVs, auto-generate dashboards, or help engineers debug through notebook-like UIs. We’re hiring software engineers across the stack—infra, backend, and product. You’ll join a small, gritty team building both foundational infra and novel internal tools to make OpenAI's production systems reliable, performant, and observable. What You’ll Do Own core observability infrastructure, including distributed logging, time series, and trace storage Build AI-native tools that help engineers detect, understand, and resolve issues autonomously. Contribute to UI experiences like dashboards, notebooking, or interactive debugging Collaborate closely with engineers, researchers, user ops, and other teams across the company to build the next generation observability product You Might Be a Fit If You: Have operated large-scale distributed systems in production. ( especially logging systems or some other time series databases) Thrive in ambiguous environments and roll up your sleeves to solve unscoped problems. Have full-stack chops or product sensibilities—you're excited to build real tools people use. Have strong fundamentals in systems, networking, and cloud infra (Kubernetes, AWS, etc). Bonus : built or contributed to observability systems (e.g. Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc). Why This Team We’re b

About the Team The Cloud Agents team builds product infrastructure for long-running agents in the cloud: orchestration, sandboxing and isolation, secure environment connectivity, secrets and identity, observability, reliability, and cost controls. These agents securely connect to diverse developer and customer environments and use tools to accomplish goals. We partner closely with product, research, and infrastructure teams to turn agentic capabilities into dependable platforms for OpenAI products and developers building on OpenAI. About the Role We are looking for an experienced software engineer to help build and scale our cloud agent platform. You will design and operate systems for orchestrating agents at scale. You will work closely with product engineers on ChatGPT, API, and Codex to define the right abstractions and enable them to ship products quickly. Strong backend or infrastructure experience is important; experience with Python, Rust, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or product platforms is especially helpful. In this role, you will: Design and scale the orchestration, sandboxing and storage systems that run agentic workloads for Codex, ChatGPT, and the OpenAI API. Partner with product engineers to build a platform that enables them to ship quickly and turn feedback into robust abstractions. Improve reliability, security, performance, and cost efficiency for long-running agents. Deploy services that can operate across different environments and clouds. Your background might look something like: 9+ years of professional engineering experience, excluding internships, in relevant roles at technology and product-driven companies. Experience leading large-scale backend, platform, or infrastructure projects from ambiguous problem statements to production systems. Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, or similar, and the ability to move across service, platform, and product boundaries. Strong understanding