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: ML Framework Engineer, you will work on improving the training throughput for our internal training framework, while enabling researchers to experiment with new ideas. This requires good engineering (for example designing, implementing, and optimizing state-of-the-art AI models), writing bug-free machine learning code (surprisingly difficult!), and acquiring deep knowledge of the performance of supercomputers. In all the projects this role pursues, the ultimate goal is to push the field forward. We’re looking for people who love optimizing performance, understanding distributed systems, and who cannot stand having bugs in their code. Since our training framework is used for large runs with massive numbers of GPUs, performance improvements here will have a large impact. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a
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Distributed Systems Engineer in San Francisco
130 active opportunities · Updated October 2026
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Explore current distributed systems engineer jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
From $230K/yr
About the Role The Engineering Acceleration Delivery / Continuous Deployment team builds and operates the systems that safely ship OpenAI’s infrastructure and product code to production. We own the deployment platform, release pipelines, and rollout safety mechanisms that allow engineers across OpenAI to deploy changes rapidly while minimizing operational risk. Our mission is to make production deployments fast, safe, and increasingly autonomous. This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, distributed systems reliability, and large-scale infrastructure orchestration. In This Role, You Will Design and build continuous deployment infrastructure that safely rolls out changes across dozens of Kubernetes clusters and global regions. Develop systems for progressive delivery, including canary releases, staged rollouts, and automated rollback. Improve engineering velocity by reducing friction in the release pipeline and automating manual operational workflows. Work with product and infrastructure teams to ensure their services are deployable, observable, and resilient at scale. Implement and evolve deployment methodologies such as GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, and progressive delivery patterns. Build systems that automatically evaluate deployment health using metrics, logs, traces, and alerts to detect regressions and trigger safe rollbacks. Build systems that support agent-assisted or autonomous deployment workflows using modern AI tooling. Technologies commonly used in this environment include: Kubernetes for large-scale container orchestration and runtime infrastructure Python and FastAPI for internal services Terraform for infrastructure as code GitOps-based deployment workflows (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux, or similar systems) Buildkite for CI orchestration You may be a strong fit if you: Have worked with Kubernetes-based deployment systems at scale Have experience building or operating continuous deployment platforms Are familiar with GitOps tooling such as
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 At Sentry, Support is an engineering discipline. Our customers are the greatest technical minds in the world—developers at elite enterprises building the future of software—and they deserve answers that go deeper than a knowledge base link. We're looking for an APAC Technical Support Engineer based in San Francisco to join our global Support Engineering team. This role is designed to provide APAC coverage to our users; with the shift being Sunday through Thursday 4PM-12AM PST. We are architecting the Technical Support engine . We’re looking for an experienced engineer to help us redefine the standard of technical support by combining deep human expertise with autonomous agentic systems. You are a debugger of both code and systems. You will treat support volume as a data signal to build automated resolution paths, ensuring our human engineers only touch the most complex, high-impact architectural puzzles. Sentry Support Engineers aren't just clearing queues; they are Orchestrators . You will engage with our users across GitHub, Discord, and our internal systems, while acting as the Technical Lead for our Agentic Ops. You ensure that when a developer asks a complex question, our systems have the right context and a seamless "Human-in-the-Loop" path to you when deep, nuanced expertise is required. In this role you will Master the Sentry Ecosystem & Support Elite Developers Deep-Dive Debugging: Perform root-cause analysis on complex issues and distributed tracing gaps across polyglot environments. Support the Great Minds: Act as a strategic consultant for senior engineers at our largest enterprise customers, s
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 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
$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 team The Billing team sits at the intersection of product, finance, and infrastructure. They're responsible for ensuring every observable event—errors, logs, traces, tokens—gets accurately measured, priced, and billed. Their work directly impacts company revenue and customer trust, requiring distributed systems expertise, attention to financial accuracy, and deep understanding of product usage patterns. The team works cross-functionally with product, engineering, BizOps, marketing, and sales to build systems that enable new products and pricing models. About the role As a Senior Software Engineer, you will architect and scale the core systems that power Sentry's billing infrastructure, ensuring accuracy and reliability at massive scale. You will collaborate on building the next generation of Sentry’s usage tracking pipeline, processing hundreds of billions of events daily with low latency and financial-grade accuracy. You will help design flexible pricing primitives that support everything from per-event usage billing to complex enterprise contracts, enabling product and sales teams to experiment rapidly while maintaining revenue accuracy and reduced time-to-market for new products. You will contribute to technical decisions on data consistency challenges unique to billing—like handling event delays, retroactive pricing changes, and distributed count reconciliation across our infrastructure. You'll love this job if you Want to solve the "easy to explain, hard to build" problems—like ensuring a customer's bill matches their usage perfectly, even when processing hundreds of billions of events daily across distributed
$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 Streaming Platform team at Sentry is building the next generation of infrastructure that powers our ingestion pipelines and real-time data processing systems. Our platform ingests, processes, and distributes hundreds of thousands of events per second with low latency and high reliability. We are creating a system that makes it easy for Sentry engineers to deploy and run Streaming Applications at scale by simplifying the complexity of Kafka, scaling consumers automatically, and managing state so product teams can focus on building great experiences for developers. As part of this team, you will work on challenges at the intersection of distributed systems, real-time data processing, and developer experience. You will help us create a self-service streaming platform that improves stability, accelerates time to production, and reduces operational overhead. In this role you will Design, build, and operate components of our Streaming Platform, including Kafka, the streaming runtime, high-level APIs, and developer-facing abstractions. Implement resilient, high-throughput stream processing systems that handle unbounded datasets with strong correctness guarantees (delivery, checkpointing, watermarking, and more). Build scalable automation and control plane for Kafka fleet management and improve efficiency. Partner with product engineers to ensure our abstractions enable fast, reliable, and consistent ingestion pipelines. Improve observability, monitoring, and failover for mission-critical real-time systems. You’ll love this job if you You enjoy working on distributed systems at scale and care about reliability and
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 Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products (such as ChatGPT & Codex) that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide. The Applied Foundations team owns the core product and platform layers that make those experiences possible — from identity & access, to safety to payments & commerce across all of our apps. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to deliver technology that is reliable, secure, and trusted at global scale. About the Role We’re hiring Backend Software Engineers to design and implement safe services and infrastructure that power our core products. What You’ll Do Architect, build, and improve scalable backend systems and APIs. Drive performance, reliability, and safety across distributed services. Implement data storage, retrieval, compute, and integration solutions. Participate in long-term architectural planning and technical design reviews. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience. You Might Thrive Here If You: Have strong experience with distributed systems, APIs, and backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, C++). Have experience setting up and maintaining production backend services and data pipelines. Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed. Enjoy building resilient services that handle large scale and complexity. Are self-directed and enjoy figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek
About the Team 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 the Team: Compute Infrastructure builds the platform that turns enormous amounts of compute into a reliable engine for frontier AI. We design, provision, schedule, operate, and optimize the systems that connect accelerators, CPUs, networks, storage, data centers, orchestration software, agent infrastructure, developer tools, and observability into one coherent experience for researchers and product teams. Our work spans the entire stack: capacity planning and cluster lifecycle, bare-metal automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes and scheduling, deep system optimization, high-performance networking, storage, fleet health, reliability, workload profiling, benchmarking, and the developer experience that lets teams use enormous compute systems with confidence. At this scale, small improvements to communication, scheduling, hardware efficiency, or debugging workflows can compound into meaningful research velocity. We are hiring across Compute Infrastructure rather than for a single narrow team, and we use this opening to match strong engineers to the problems where they can have the most leverage. About the Role We are looking for engineers who want to build the compute platform behind OpenAI's research and products. You may not be the strongest in low-level systems, high-performance computing, distributed infrastructure, reliability, CaaS, agent infrastructure, developer platforms, tooling, or the user experience around infrastructure. What matters is that you can reason carefully about complex systems, write durable software, and raise the quality and velocity of the people around you. Depending on your background and interests, you might work close to hardware, close to users, on CaaS and agent infrastructure, or on the control planes and data planes in between. You could help bring new supercomputing capacity online, optimize training workloads from profiler traces and benchmarks, improve NCCL and collective communication behavior, reason about GPUs, NICs, t
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
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