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
Jobs in United States
Distributed Systems Engineer in United States
426 active opportunities · Updated October 2026
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Explore current distributed systems engineer jobs across United States. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
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
At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. We are the Snowflake Metadata team. We own Snowflake’s metadata systems that make it easy for customers to query, modify and manage their petabyte-scale data. We develop distributed systems that store and maintain metadata, transaction frameworks that power Snowflake’s query and DML capabilities, asynchronous systems that provide time travel and lifecycle management capabilities and entity metadata supporting DDL capabilities. We also build foundational capabilities that deliver global features like cross-region replication (Snowgrid), data sharing, and data marketplace. AS A PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT SNOWFLAKE YOU WILL: Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical problem solving skills. Design, develop and support fault-tolerant scalable distributed systems for our Snowgrid and Data Sharing teams. Create architecture and design, influence our product roadmap, and take ownership and responsibility over new projects. Analyze fault-tolerance and high availability issues, performance and scale challenges, and solve them. Mentor and grow junior engineers. Understand trade-offs between consistency, performance and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services. Ensure operational readiness of
A World-Changing Company Palantir builds the world’s leading software for data-driven decisions and operations. By bringing the right data to the people who need it, our platforms empower our partners to develop lifesaving drugs, forecast supply chain disruptions, locate missing children, and more. The Role Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineers (FDIEs) build, operate, and maintain the infrastructure that powers Palantir’s platforms and production deployments. As an FDIE intern, you’ll work alongside full-time FDIEs to deploy and operate Palantir software across real production environments, automate manual processes, and develop novel solutions to infrastructure challenges using tools like Foundry and Apollo. Every day looks different — you might be debugging a distributed systems issue, building automation to replace a manual runbook, or designing infrastructure improvements that scale across multiple deployments. You’ll be treated as a full member of the team, with real ownership over the work you take on. Core Responsibilities As an FDIE intern, your responsibilities look similar to those at a small startup, with the resources, stability, and mentorship of an established tech company. You’ll work in small teams with minimal supervision and own end-to-end execution of real infrastructure projects. Your day might span discussing systems architecture with fellow engineers, debugging a production issue, building automation to eliminate a manual process, or deploying new Palantir products across production environments. FDIE interns are treated just like full-time engineers, with significant freedom and ownership over their work. Specifically, you can expect to: Deploy and operate Palantir software across production environments, including monitoring, alerting, configuration management, and upgrades Debug, improve, and optimize Palantir’s services and infra
We are seeking a highly skilled and hard-working Senior Test Developer / test engineer to join our multifaceted Enterprise Software QA team. This role offers an outstanding opportunity to leave your mark on the design, construction, optimization and testing of large-scale infrastructure for various foundational NVIDIA unified cloud services and data center offerings. If you are a dedicated engineer with strong expertise in cloud infrastructure and distributed systems and want to apply your skills with AI tools, this role could fit you perfectly. You will thrive in an exciting, innovative environment. What you'll be doing: Work with development teams on test plans for all layers of SW stack for cloud infrastructure, execution, reviews, failure analysis and assessing overall quality and risk. Work with customer PMs on software issues including technical feedback from OEMs and CSPs. Develop key benchmarks to track execution and deploy process improvements to improve efficiency Leverage AI skills to expedite the test scope, test plan, execution and automation workflows. Lead NVIDIA Cloud and Data Center bring up activities which will involve validation, reporting, working with engineering to debug issues, providing design input at times, adding coverage in different areas. Design, develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines for continuous testing in cloud environments when needed. Perform performance, scalability, and reliability testing of cloud services. Implement and maintain test environments in cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Supervise the infrastructure to alert on significant events, ensuring the highest level of system performance and reliability. Work with various different partner teams to ensure availability of clusters to test on and take the lead in resolve all issues. Working with tea
$225K – $300K/yr
CLEAR is building THE secure identity company of the future. Our mission is to make experiences safer and easier—physically and digitally. With more than 43 million Members and a growing network of partners across the world, CLEAR's secure identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether it’s at the airport, stadium, or throughout your everyday life, CLEAR unlocks the magic of frictionless experiences. Today, CLEAR is well-known as a leader in digital and biometric identification, reducing friction for our members wherever an ID check is needed. We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to establish our Observability framework and foundations. You will join us to accelerate building and scaling our innovative systems that support our growing identity platform. You will drive on Observability best practices to find and fix gaps in our observability and our overall systems. You will also lead practices such as load testing, capacity planning, game days, chaos testing, and incident post-mortems. What You Will Do: Embed within the Engineering pillar to deeply understand the product and implement observability across all key flows Facilitate and build load testing cases, ensuring we understand the limits and scaling factors of our services and systems Contribute to observability and support the design of new services and systems, ensuring highly reliable and scalable concepts are implemented Build and lead practices such as game days, chaos engineering, and failure analysis Build long-term capacity plans, with an eye toward reliability and cost-efficiency Who You Are: 6+ experience writing production-grade software in a modern language, such as Java and Python. Strong knowledge of distributed systems concepts (think CAP theorem), microservices architecture, and distributed tracing . Experience with modern observability systems such as Datadog. Experience with performance debugging tools and patterns. You should be able to read a f
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
Replit is the agentic software creation platform that enables anyone to build applications using natural language. With millions of users worldwide, Replit is democratizing software development by removing traditional barriers to application creation. About the role: As a New Grad Software Engineer, you'll join a team of exceptional builders working on products that are reshaping how the world creates software. You'll have the opportunity to work on everything from our AI-powered development platform to the distributed systems that enable real-time collaboration for millions of developers. This is a chance to define your career while defining the future of software development. You'll work on problems that matter, with the autonomy to drive solutions and the support to grow into a technical leader. What you will build: Product features that delight users and make it possible for anybody to create software AI coding agent that understands intent and generates production-ready applications Cloud infrastructure that provides instant, powerful development environments at global scale Platform features that enable one click deployments and scale to millions of users Required skills and experience: Recent graduate (2027) with a degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field Strong programming skills in a modern language (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust) Full-stack capabilities with experience in React, Node.js, and database technologies Growth orientation - eager to learn new technologies and take on increasing responsibility Collaborative spirit - you work well in cross-functional teams and value diverse perspectives What we value : Problem-solving mindset: Ability to approach complex operational challenges systematically and devise effective solutions Self-directed and autonomous: Capable of working independently while collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams Strong communication skills: Ability to explain complex technical conce
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
From $218K/yr
Ready to do the most impactful work of your career? At Coinbase , we are uncompromising on our mission to increase economic freedom. The bar is high, the environment is intense, and we like it that way. This isn't a place for complacency, it’s a place to be pushed past your perceived limits. If you're ready to build the future of finance alongside people who refuse to settle for "good enough," you belong here. Coinbase is a remote-first, but not remote-only company. Expect to get together quarterly for intense in-person working sessions called “surges.” learn more about working at Coinbase . As a Staff Software Engineer on the Core Automation team within the Platform group, you'll architect and build the Agentic AI systems that are transforming how Coinbase operates. This team is reimagining customer support and compliance processes for a fully AI-driven world, designing intelligent agents, orchestration frameworks, and measurement systems that deliver delightful customer experiences at scale. You'll own the technical direction for production AI systems, working across cross-functional teams to bring this vision to reality while building primitives that scale automation across the company. What you'll do: Architect and build Agentic AI systems that power Coinbase's compliance automation and other Operations, from intelligent agents through orchestration and guardrails Design foundational APIs and measurement frameworks that ensure AI agents are grounded, relevant, and reliably deliver customer delight with minimal hallucination Lead technical direction for distributed systems underpinning AI automation, defining architecture patterns and strategic roadmaps in partnership with engineering leadership Build reusable primitives and orchestration solutions that enable AI-powered automation to scale across multiple domains beyond the initial customer support and compliance focus Mentor engineers on AI system design techniques, coding standards, and production-
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 Pinecone Pinecone is the knowledge infrastructure for AI at scale. Its leading vector database and knowledge engine, Pinecone Nexus, power accurate, performant AI applications for more than 9,000 customers and 800,000 developers worldwide. Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable. Pinecone is based in New York and raised $138M in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Menlo Ventures, and Wing Venture Capital. About the Team and Role: Join a team that builds robust, real-time distributed systems for a cutting-edge database. We care about performance, reliability, scalability, and most of all learning and having fun together. Whether you’re a seasoned coder or just getting started, if you’re passionate about technology and eager to learn, you’ll fit right in. Who we are: We show up to work, ready to collaborate and build technologies that make a difference, with people who genuinely care. We chase improvements such as tail latencies, bytes throughput, cache hit rate, and operational cost efficiency. We believe learning is ongoing and that even the most complex problems can have simple solutions. What You’ll Do: Collaborate with teammates to design and build database features that power AI applications. Learn how to tune performance and support reliability in distributed systems (don’t worry, we’ll guide you). Help Pinecone run smoothly on popular cloud providers. Take ownership of your work and grow your skills every day. Have fun. Who You Are: 5+ years of work experience - programming in Rust, Go, C++, or a comparable language. You’re genuinely curious about distributed systems and eager to dive deep into technical challenges. You approach problems with creativity and persistence, and you’re comfortable asking thoughtful questions or seeking feedback. You’re excited to learn, value constructive feedback, and appreciate mentorship. Bonus Points: You have hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) or have demonstrated an ability to pick u
From $192K/yr
Senior Software Engineer - Streaming Platform Client Data streams are mission-critical at Datadog, powering near real-time communication across the vast majority of our services. Our Streaming Platform group builds the core infrastructure and abstractions that ensure Datadog remains a trusted partner for engineers worldwide. See our blog post . The Streaming Platform Client team sits at the heart of this ecosystem. We own the Rust client library (producers and consumers) with language bindings for Java, Go, and Python. We focus on building intuitive APIs and abstractions that make a powerful distributed system easy to adopt and operate for the hundreds of internal users of our library. Our library runs on critical data paths that handle hundreds of millions of messages per second making performance, observability, and reliability paramount. We also develop and operate the service that bridges the clients fleet with the platform's control plane, handling complex balancing, scaling, and static stability challenges. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help us evolve these features. You will collaborate directly with our users, tackle performance-critical code, and solve complex distributed systems challenges across the control plane, client libraries, and data plane. At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them. What You’ll Do: Work within a distributed, high-impact team spanning Europe and the US, building critical technologies that power data pipelines for dozens of internal teams and hundreds of services. Architect and implement resilient interactions between our client libraries and the control plane. Optimize our high-throughput, low-level streaming library to push the boundaries of performance and efficiency. Champion the developer experience by providing
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