Distributed Systems Engineer in San Francisco

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. The Data Governance team makes sure Plaid handles consumer and customer data responsibly — and can prove it. Our mission is to enforce Plaid's privacy commitments and regulatory obligations in the systems themselves rather than in policy documents: we build the platform and controls that govern how data flows through Plaid — where it lives, who can use it, for what purpose, and for how long. That includes verifiable deletion of consumer data on request, enforcement of data-use restrictions so downstream systems can only use data in permitted ways, and the cataloging and classification that let Plaid know what data it holds and how sensitive it is. We operate at the scale of Plaid's entire data footprint, and correctness and auditability matter to us as much as throughput. As a Staff Software Engineer on Data Governance, you will set the technical direction for how Plaid enforces data governance at scale. You'll lead the design of distributed backend systems that reliably delete, restrict, and track data across dozens of services, making architectural decisions whose blast radius spans the whole company. You'll drive multi-quarter initiatives from ambiguous privacy and regulatory requirements through

About the Team The Online Data team builds and operates the core online database and indexing services for OpenAI’s production AI applications, including supporting the explosive growth of ChatGPT, the #1 AI app in the world, and Codex, the fastest growing agentic development toolset in the world. Our mission is to ensure the reliability, correctness, and scalability of our online data stack and to curate a comprehensive portfolio of services that matches the relentless ambition of OpenAI, enabling our product and research teams to build 0-100 without getting bogged down in the minutiae of multi-region, multi-cloud, exabyte-scale data infrastructure. About the Role We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our Online Data Systems team, responsible for our in-house database and indexing technology. This role is about shepherding a team of world-class engineers tasked with building and operating hyperscale data storage and retrieval technology. You’ll be overseeing the delivery of extremely challenging engineering work in areas like distributed query execution, multi-region federation, self-orchestrating and self-healing services, low-level performance optimization, and more. There are few companies in the world building this kind of technology in-house at this scale where you’ll still be getting in on the ground floor. Instead of being a cog in the machine spending months chasing small optimizations, you’ll play a major part of shaping our future. In this role, you will: Build, lead, and grow high-performing infrastructure engineering teams. Drive the evolution of OpenAI’s in-house online data technologies, our core, hyper-scale database systems, indexing technologies, and vector search. Anchor delivery around measurable reliability goals (SLOs, etc) to ensure system performance and resiliency is above reproach. Champion pragmatic use of agent technology to amplify execution velocity. Reduce operational toil and incident frequency through better abstractions, gua

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 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

OpenAI’s charter calls on us to ensure the benefits of AI are distributed broadly and safely. Our Health AI team focuses on expanding access to high-quality medical expertise and aims to set a high standard for deploying AI responsibly in high-stakes domains. Improving health will be one of the defining impacts of AGI. Today, millions of people lack access to reliable medical information, and clinicians around the world face increasing time and resource constraints. We are building AI systems that support patients, clinicians, and health workers, while meeting the highest standards for safety, reliability, and privacy. We are seeking full stack software engineers to help build and scale products used by consumers and care providers globally. You will work closely with product, design, and research teams to ship real systems in a fast-moving, high-impact environment. In this role, you will: Design and build scalable fullstack systems for consumer and enterprise health. Own end-to-end feature development—from early design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and iteration. Build and maintain data pipelines and services that meet strict privacy, security, and compliance requirements (e.g., HIPAA). Collaborate closely with researchers and safety teams to integrate reliability, evaluation, and guardrails into production systems. Debug, optimize, and harden systems to support high availability, performance, and global scale. Take ownership of ambiguous problems and drive them to practical, high-quality solutions. You might thrive in this role if you: Are deeply motivated by improving health outcomes and expanding access to medical expertise. Are a strong engineer who enjoys building durable, well-designed systems. Have 5+ years of experience writing maintainable, production-quality code. Can operate with high agency—owning problems end-to-end with minimal supervision. Enjoy working in fast-moving, cross-functional teams with engineers, product managers, desi

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 Full Stack engineers within the Fleet Scheduling team are dedicated to building intuitive and scalable interfaces that empower researchers to efficiently manage AI workloads across some of the largest supercomputers in the world. Our focus is on developing robust, high-performance systems that provide real-time insights, resource tracking, and seamless interaction with complex infrastructure. We aim to optimize resource allocation, minimize operational overhead, and create user-friendly tools that enhance researcher productivity and system transparency. About the Role You will design, develop, and operate web-based systems that provide a powerful and intuitive interface to OpenAI’s supercomputing clusters. You will collaborate closely with researcher, product and infrastructure teams to deliver scalable solutions that enable seamless monitoring, job scheduling, and resource management. This is an opportunity to work at the cutting edge of AI infrastructure, designing tools that scale to exascale workloads while maintaining usability and performance. 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 and develop full-stack web applications to track, monitor, and manage large-scale AI workloads in real time. Collaborate with researchers and infrastructure teams to translate complex operational needs into intuitive UIs and scalable backends. Build data visualization tools (e.g., Gantt charts, dashboards) to provide insights into job scheduling and resource allocation. Optimize backend services to handle massive data throughput while ensuring low-latency performance and high availability. Implement frontend components that provide seamless interactions with scheduling, storage, and compute systems. Ensure system security, reliability, and scalability across globally distributed supercomputing infrastructure. You might thrive i

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 As a software engineer on the Scaling team, you’ll help build and optimize the low-level stack that orchestrates computation and data movement across OpenAI’s supercomputing clusters. Your work will involve designing high-performance runtimes, building custom kernels, contributing to compiler infrastructure, and developing scalable simulation systems to validate and optimize distributed training workloads. You will work at the intersection of systems programming, ML infrastructure, and high-performance computing, helping to create both ergonomic developer APIs and highly efficient runtime systems. This means balancing ease of use and introspection with the need for stability and performance on our evolving hardware fleet. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model (3 days/week in-office). Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Design and build APIs and runtime components to orchestrate computation and data movement across heterogeneous ML workloads. Contribute to compiler infrastructure, including the development of optimizations and compiler passes to support evolving hardware. Engineer and optimize compute and data kernels, ensuring correctness, high performance, and portability across simulation and production environments. Profile and optimize system bottlenecks, especially around I/O, memory hierarchy, and interconnects, at both local and distributed scales. Develop simulation infrastructure to validate runtime b

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops system and infrastructure solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. We work closely with architecture, infrastructure, and vendor teams to evaluate system performance and guide critical design decisions. Our team focuses on building and applying performance modeling frameworks to understand system behavior, quantify tradeoffs, and support next-generation infrastructure design. About the Role We are seeking an Performance Modeling Engineer to support the development and application of modeling tools used to evaluate AI system performance and inform architectural decisions. In this role, you will partner closely with Senior Performance Modeling Engineers and the Performance Modeling Lead to analyze system behavior, run simulations and analytical models, and help evaluate tradeoffs across compute, memory, networking, and storage. You will contribute to building modeling frameworks while developing a strong foundation in system architecture and AI infrastructure. This role is ideal for early-career engineers with 1–2 years of experience in software engineering, systems analysis, or performance modeling who are excited to grow in large-scale infrastructure and hardware/software systems. 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. Key Responsibilities Support the development and maintenance of performance modeling tools and frameworks Assist in building models to evaluate system behavior across compute, memory, networking, and interconnect subsystems Help analyze distributed system scaling behavior and identify performance bottlenecks Run simulations and analytical models to support architecture and infrastructure decisions Partner with senior engineers to evaluate design tradeoffs across hardware and system components Interpret modeling outputs and help translate findings into clear recommendations Vali

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

About the Team The Core Network Engineering team owns the end-to-end networking stack that connects OpenAI’s compute infrastructure — spanning global WAN/edge connectivity, data-center networking, and high-performance host/xPU networking used for large-scale training and inference workloads. This team is responsible for ensuring networking is never the bottleneck to model training efficiency, cluster reliability, or fleet expansion. They design and operate the systems that provide predictable, high-throughput, low-latency connectivity across some of the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure. About the Role We’re looking for engineers to help build and operate the networking foundation behind OpenAI’s frontier AI systems. Depending on your background and area of focus, you may work across host networking, datacenter fabrics, or global WAN infrastructure. The problems span low-level systems software, distributed infrastructure, protocol readiness, observability, performance engineering, automation, and large-scale network operations. You’ll work on systems where microseconds of latency, tail performance, and network reliability directly impact model training efficiency and production serving performance. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy operating close to the hardware/software boundary and solving performance-critical infrastructure problems at massive scale. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate networking systems that support large-scale AI training and inference infrastructure Improve performance, reliability, and scalability across host networking, datacenter fabrics, and WAN systems Develop automation for provisioning, configuration management, validation, upgrades, and lifecycle management of networking infrastructure Build tooling and observability systems for network health, performance analysis, debugging, and automated remediation Optimize network performance across technologies such as RDMA, RoCE, InfiniBand, Ethernet, and high-perf

About the Team The Scaling team is responsible for the architectural and engineering backbone of OpenAI’s infrastructure. We design and deliver advanced systems that support the deployment and operation of cutting-edge AI models. Our work spans system software, networking, platform architecture, fleet-level monitoring, and performance optimization. About the Role We’re hiring an SW Engineer to enable production workloads and end-to-end testing on new platforms. This role will include creating new test harnesses and platform stress benchmarks, porting existing inference and training workloads to new, sometimes early-access, systems/hardware, analyzing performance and bottlenecks, and characterizing the end-to-end behavior of new systems (compute, comms, storage, control plane, and failure modes). Key Responsibilities Port and validate key inference and training workloads on new platforms/SKUs as they arrive; drive correctness, performance, and stability to an internal readiness bar. Build a suite of benchmarks and stress tests that capture real E2E behavior of our workloads by exercising all aspects of a system, including CPU, GPU, memory subsystem, frontend, scale-up, and scale-out networking (including WAN traffic, NVlink and RDMA collectives), storage, thermals, and any other relevant parts. Deep-dive performance on distributed training/inference: Collective performance and tuning (across NCCL/RCCL and internal libraries) Overlap of compute/communication, kernel-level bottlenecks, memory bandwidth and scheduling effects Create repeatable test harnesses that run in CI / lab environments and produce actionable outputs (pass/fail, performance score, regression detection). Partner with systems + fleet bring-up engineers to ensure the platform is not only stable and performant, but also operationally usable and scalable (containerization, K8s integration, telemetry hooks, failure triage loops). Work cross-functionally with vendors and internal stakeholders by producing

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? The Data Infrastructure team at Cohere is responsible for the storage and data movement layer underlying every model training run. We're building the unified storage layer that feeds our training workloads. It needs to serve petabytes of training data and model checkpoints fast enough to keep thousands of GPUs busy across several training clusters. In this role, you’d have an opportunity to build this system from the ground up. You’d be a key contributor, working on a problem few teams have had to solve at this scale. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate the distributed storage system that feeds model training and evaluation. Run this system multiple on Kubernetes clusters at petabyte scale. Work with researchers and training-infra teams on how jobs actually read and write data, and turn that into throughput, latency, and durability requirements Work through the networking, I/O, and consistency problems of moving large datasets and checkpoints across regions and backends, with GPU idle time and time-to-insight as the measures of success You may be a good fit if you have: Strong storage fundamentals,

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

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