Distributed Systems Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team Data Platform at OpenAI owns the foundational data stack powering critical product, research, and analytics workflows. We operate some of the largest Spark compute fleets in production; design, and build data lakes and metadata systems on Iceberg and Delta with a vision toward exabyte-scale architecture; run high throughput streaming platforms on Kafka and Flink; provide orchestration with Airflow; and support ML feature engineering tooling such as Chronon. Our mission is to deliver reliable, secure, and efficient data access at scale and accelerate intelligent, AI assisted data workflows. Join us to build and operate these core platforms that underpin OpenAI products, research, and analytics. We’re not just scaling infrastructure – we’re redefining how people interact with data. Our vision includes intelligent interfaces and AI-assisted workflows that make working with data faster, more reliable, and more intuitive. About the Role This role focuses on building and operating data infrastructure that supports massive compute fleets and storage systems, designed for high performance and scalability. You’ll help design, build, and operate the next generation of data infrastructure at OpenAI. You will scale and harden big data compute and storage platforms, build and support high-throughput streaming systems, build and operate low latency data ingestions, enable secure and governed data access for ML and analytics, and design for reliability and performance at extreme scale. You will take full lifecycle ownership: architecture, implementation, production operations, and on-call participation. You’ve supported Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Trino, or Iceberg as platforms. You’re well-versed in infrastructure tooling like Terraform, experienced in debugging large-scale distributed systems, and excited about solving data infrastructure problems in the AI space. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per wee

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

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 OpenAI OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our mission requires building not only world-class AI models, but also the infrastructure that enables those models to be deployed reliably, efficiently, and at global scale. As demand for AI continues to grow, we are expanding the ways OpenAI can bring high-performance inference capacity online across a diverse hardware ecosystem. About the Team The GPT Infrastructure team builds software that turns advanced inference and optimization research into production products. One focus is enabling strategic infrastructure partners and accelerator vendors to qualify and onboard new compute without a bespoke porting and optimization effort for every hardware platform. We build the control planes, APIs, secure partner-side execution environments, evaluation systems, artifact pipelines, and operational tooling that make these workflows repeatable and trustworthy. The work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, AI inference, compilers and runtimes, performance engineering, security, and external partnerships. About the Role We are seeking an experienced systems generalist who can work comfortably across the stack to help build an automated inference optimization platform. Given a workload, target hardware profile, compiler and runtime context, and a trusted verifier, the system runs durable optimization campaigns that generate, compile, execute, grade, and improve candidate kernels, runtime configurations, and serving-stack changes. You will design both the OpenAI-hosted control plane and the partner-side software that evaluates candidates on real accelerator hardware. The product must keep long-running workflows reliable, make performance results reproducible, and maintain clear trust boundaries around sensitive model and hardware information. This is a deeply cross-stack role, combining strong software engineering fundamentals with systems thinking and

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 team? The GPU Clusters team builds and operates the superclusters that train Cohere’s frontier models. We sit at the intersection of hardware, distributed systems, and AI research. We work with cloud providers, researchers, and other infrastructure teams on problems few companies get to take on. As an Engineering Manager, you’ll lead a team of engineers who care deeply about GPU infrastructure. You’ll set technical direction, grow people, and help the company scale a rapidly growing compute footprint. As an Engineering Manager, you will: Hire, mentor, and grow a team of GPU infrastructure engineers , including performance, career development, and technical guidance on hard infrastructure problems Own the technical roadmap for the fleet: how we deploy, operate, and scale Kubernetes clusters, including workload scheduling, hardware fault detection, and performance Partner with researchers and ML engineers so the training and inference stack works well on new GPU architectures Work with cross-functional stakeholders such as Capacity, Finance, Legal, Security, and other infrastructure teams on planning, cost, compliance, an

About the Team Our Inference team brings OpenAI’s most capable research and technology to the world through our products. We empower consumers, enterprise and developers alike to use and access our start-of-the-art AI models, allowing them to do things that they’ve never been able to before. We focus on performant and efficient model inference, as well as accelerating research progression via model inference. About the Role We are looking for an engineer who wants to take the world's largest and most capable AI models and optimize them for use in a high-volume, low-latency, and high-availability production and research environment. In this role, you will: Work alongside machine learning researchers, engineers, and product managers to bring our latest technologies into production. Work alongside researchers to enable advanced research through awesome engineering. Introduce new techniques, tools, and architecture that improve the performance, latency, throughput, and efficiency of our model inference stack. Build tools to give us visibility into our bottlenecks and sources of instability and then design and implement solutions to address the highest priority issues. Optimize our code and fleet of Azure VMs to utilize every FLOP and every GB of GPU RAM of our hardware. You might thrive in this role if you: Have an understanding of modern ML architectures and an intuition for how to optimize their performance, particularly for inference. Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. Have at least 5 years of professional software engineering experience. Have or can quickly gain familiarity with PyTorch, NVidia GPUs and the software stacks that optimize them (e.g. NCCL, CUDA), as well as HPC technologies such as InfiniBand, MPI, NVLink, etc. Have experience architecting, building, observing, and debugging production distributed systems. Bonus point if worked on performance-critical distributed systems. Have need

Who Are We? Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman. P.S: We highly recommend reading The "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman. The Opportunity The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team tackles some of Postman's most strategic technical challenges. We partner directly with enterprise customers to solve problems that don't fit neatly into existing product boundaries, building production-grade solutions that often become core product capabilities. As a Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll operate at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer success. You'll deploy Postman's critical infrastructure into customer environments, solve complex distributed systems challenges, and build the enterprise foundations that enable customers to safely adopt AI at scale. This isn't consulting or professional services. You're an engineer building production systems alongside customers, turning real-world deployments into durable platform capabilities used by thousands of organizations. This team will build 0-to-1 products from scratch - innovative, strategic initiatives designed to unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue. If you enjoy difficult engineering problems, working directly with customers, and building products from the field

Our Purpose Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential. Title and Summary Vice President, Software Engineering Overview Decision Stream is Mastercard's next-generation AI-native decisioning platform, designed to power intelligent, real-time decisions across fraud, authentication, payments, and risk. Built with a startup mindset and enterprise-scale ambition, the platform combines innovation, speed, and engineering excellence to redefine decisioning across Mastercard's global ecosystem. We are seeking a visionary and hands-on VP of Software Engineering to help build and scale the platform. This leader will partner closely with Product, Architecture, AI, and Platform Engineering teams to drive technology strategy, architecture, engineering execution, and organizational growth. What You'll Do Lead Through Technical Excellence • Serve as a senior technology leader and role model for engineering teams. • Drive architecture, design, and technology decisions across distributed systems, streaming, AI, and cloud-native platforms. • Engage deeply with engineers, architects, and product leaders to solve complex technical challenges. • Influence engineering standards, software quality, and operational excellence. Build and Scale the Platform • Help shape and deliver a highly scalable, resilient, and secure decisioning platform operating at Mastercard scale. • Balan

About the team Preparedness is a critical Safety Research team at OpenAI, which is focused on mitigating AI threats to global security that could scale to an extreme level of severity. Our work involves: Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems. Mitigation. Keeping misuse safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future. Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework , and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets. This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society. About the role As AI agents become more capable at software engineering, and automate more of our internal work, they could become a dangerous cyber threat. People in this role will help OpenAI prepare for security threats from advanced AI agent insiders. In this role, you will: Identify paths by which capable future internal AI agents could compromise OpenAI. Design security controls - focusing on measures with long lead times that benefit from advanced preparation. Stress-test defenses with AI agent evaluations and penetration tests You might thrive in this role if you: Are deeply technical across security and modern infrastructure, and are comfortable digging into the details of operating systems, cloud, containers, CI/CD, or distributed systems. Have strong software engineering skills and enjoy building prototypes yourself. Are interested in engaging with stakeholders and can do so effectively. Bonus: have experience securing cloud infrastructure, and are deeply familiar with core components of the AI stack. Compensation Range: $293K - $405K USD 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

About the Team Training Runtime builds the distributed systems that power OpenAI's largest model training runs - most recently GPT-5.5! The Data Movement area owns the infrastructure that keeps training jobs supplied with the right data at the right time, and keeps model state moving safely and efficiently across large clusters. Our work spans machine learning systems, distributed storage, high-throughput data loading, reliability engineering, and developer experience. Success means researchers can move quickly while training runs remain fast, reproducible, debuggable, and resilient at scale. About the Role We are looking for a deeply hands-on Technical Lead Manager to own datasets throughout our training infrastructure. This person will set the direction for how training jobs read data: the APIs, storage contracts, versioning model, benchmarks, debugging tools, and reliability guarantees that make data access consistent across current and future training frameworks. You will begin as the primary technical owner for dataset reads, working directly in the code while aligning researchers, training framework owners, storage teams, and infrastructure partners around a durable platform. The problem is deceptively hard at frontier scale: make enormous, heterogeneous datasets easy to consume, correct across distributed workers, observable when something goes wrong, and flexible enough to support pretraining, reinforcement learning, and multimodal training. In this role, you will Design and build a unified dataset read platform for multiple current and future training frameworks. Define dataset APIs, storage-format expectations, registration/versioning, and migration paths that make data access reproducible and maintainable. Build reliability into the read path, including stateful iteration, caching, fast restart, recovery, and clear operational contracts. Build terminal and web-based visualizers that let teams inspect text, multimodal, and reinforcement learning data late

About the Team OpenAI’s Research Program Management team partners with researchers and engineers to advance the development of increasingly capable, safe, and beneficial AI systems. We work alongside teams developing our core models, helping turn ambitious research goals into coordinated execution across model training, alignment and safety, and research infrastructure. The team also regularly collaborates with our closest cross-functional partners such as Security, Applied product and engineering, Strategy, and Scaling. About the Role As a Research Program Manager, you will embed with research teams and help drive some of the most technically complex and consequential work behind OpenAI’s model development. Depending on your focus, your work may span training, reasoning, evaluations, compute, research infrastructure, safety, model launch readiness, and governance. You will translate evolving research priorities into actionable programs, help teams navigate technical and operational tradeoffs, and keep important work moving as new issues emerge. This is a hands-on technical role: you will engage directly with research workflows, experimental results, technical systems, and engineering constraints; not simply coordinate from the sidelines. 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. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 5+ years of experience in research program management, technical program management, or related roles in fast-moving environments. Can engage substantively with researchers and engineers on topics such as model training, experimental design, model safety, evaluation methods, data workflows, compute infrastructure, or distributed systems. Are comfortable working directly with technical tools, research data, experimental results, or operational workflows to understand problems and develop practical solutions. Have a strong track record of movi

Who Are We? Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman. P.S: We highly recommend reading The "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman. The Opportunity As a Member of Technical Staff on AI Infrastructure, you will build and maintain the foundational systems and distributed infrastructure that power AI model post training, inference, and data pipelines. You will collaborate with engineering and research teams to ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of critical AI systems. What You’ll Do Design and implement large-scale, distributed AI infrastructure and services Optimize performance for GPU/xPU accelerators and cloud environments Build tools for observability, reliability, and scaling of AI workloads Partner with cross-functional teams to define AI infrastructure requirements and roadmap Contribute to architectural design and system longevity About You Have experience with GenAI infrastructure systems, distributed systems, cloud computing, and high-performance infrastructure Are proficient in programming languages like Python, Go, or similar Understand scaling challenges specific to AI workloads and accelerators Thrive in fast-paced, collaborative engineering environments The reasonably estimated base salary for this role ranges from $256,000.00 to $276,

About the Team The Systems Integration team is responsible for building the infrastructure, tooling, and validation systems that ensure our device software our device software is reliable, testable, and ready to ship. We design and maintain build systems, CI pipelines, automated test frameworks, and hardware-in-the-loop labs to enable rapid, safe product launches. Our work spans build systems, developer tools, systems integration, and cross-team collaboration to ensure developers can build reliably and ship with confidence. About the Role We are looking for an engineer to help evolve OpenAI’s Consumer Products build and continuous integration systems for a fast-growing engineering organization. This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, build systems, distributed infrastructure, software quality, and on-device software. You will work on the systems that determine how quickly and confident engineers can move: Bazel-bazed builds, Buildkite pipelines, test coverage, remote caching and execution, CI observability, and tooling that helps engineers understand and fix failures quickly. Our mission is to enable OpenAI to ship software running on consumer devices rapidly with a high bar for correctness, reliability, and safety. The best version of this work is invisible when it succeeds: builds are fast, tests are trusted, CI failures are understandable, and engineers can focus on shipping products instead of fighting infrastructure. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In This Role, You Will Own and evolve Bazel and yocto-based build and test workflows in a polyrepo environment Design and maintain Starlark rules, macros, toolchains, and integrations that make builds hermetic, reproducible, and easy for teams to adopt Improve CI performance and reliability across Buildkite pipelines, including queue time, build time, cache hit rates, retry b

About the Team The Systems Integration team is responsible for building the infrastructure, tooling, and validation systems that ensure our device software our device software is reliable, testable, and ready to ship. We design and maintain build systems, CI pipelines, automated test frameworks, and hardware-in-the-loop labs to enable rapid, safe product launches. Our work spans build systems, developer tools, systems integration, and cross-team collaboration to ensure developers can build reliably and ship with confidence. About the Role We are looking for an engineer to help evolve OpenAI’s Consumer Products build and continuous integration systems for a fast-growing engineering organization. This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, build systems, distributed infrastructure, software quality, and on-device software. You will work on the systems that determine how quickly and confident engineers can move: Bazel-bazed builds, Buildkite pipelines, test coverage, remote caching and execution, CI observability, and tooling that helps engineers understand and fix failures quickly. Our mission is to enable OpenAI to ship software running on consumer devices rapidly with a high bar for correctness, reliability, and safety. The best version of this work is invisible when it succeeds: builds are fast, tests are trusted, CI failures are understandable, and engineers can focus on shipping products instead of fighting infrastructure. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In This Role, You Will Own and evolve Bazel and yocto-based build and test workflows in a polyrepo environment Design and maintain Starlark rules, macros, toolchains, and integrations that make builds hermetic, reproducible, and easy for teams to adopt Improve CI performance and reliability across Buildkite pipelines, including queue time, build time, cache hit rates, retry b

About the Role The Engineering Acceleration team builds and operates the foundational systems that engineers use to build, test, and ship ChatGPT, the API, and OpenAI's infrastructure. We are looking for an engineer to help evolve OpenAI's build and continuous integration systems for a fast-growing engineering organization. This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, build systems, distributed infrastructure, and software quality. You will work on the systems that determine how quickly and confidently engineers can move: Bazel-based builds, Buildkite pipelines, test selection, remote caching and execution, CI observability, and tooling that helps engineers understand and fix failures quickly. Our mission is to make OpenAI one of the most productive engineering organizations in the world while preserving a high bar for correctness, reliability, and safety. The best version of this work is invisible when it succeeds: builds are fast, tests are trusted, CI failures are understandable, and engineers can focus on shipping useful systems instead of fighting infrastructure. In This Role, You Will Own and evolve Bazel-based build and test workflows across a large, polyglot monorepo. Design and maintain Starlark rules, macros, toolchains, and integrations that make builds reproducible, hermetic, and easy for product teams to adopt. Improve CI performance and reliability across Buildkite pipelines, including queue time, build time, cache hit rates, test sharding, retry behavior, and flake isolation. Build systems that reduce unnecessary CI work through affected-target detection, dependency graph analysis, test selection, caching, batching, and smarter scheduling. Improve local development workflows so engineers can reproduce CI behavior, debug build failures, and iterate quickly without learning every detail of the build stack. Operate and optimize build infrastructure across Docker/OCI images, Kubernetes-based runners, cloud resources, and remote cache/exec