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
Jobs in United States
Lead Senior Software Engineer Distributed Systems in San Francisco
414 active opportunities · Updated September 2026
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Explore current lead senior software engineer distributed systems jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
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rising · 123 related jobs
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+415%
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Remote options
6.5%
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$277.5K – $277.5K/yr
Based on 15 salary observations
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
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
$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 Events Analytics Platform (EAP) team is responsible for the infrastructure that powers all of Sentry's time-series data and searching capabilities across billions of events with sub-second latency. We started this initiative by building Snuba, the primary storage and query service for Sentry's event data powered by ClickHouse, and we are now focused on unlocking deeper visibility and reporting across the terabytes of event data our users generate. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will lead efforts to push the boundaries of data visibility at Sentry. You will do this by expanding the capabilities of our search infrastructure, building new capabilities on top of our state-of-the-art storage layer and increasing the performance and integrity of Sentry’s core data services. You will also help shape Infrastructure's technical direction at Sentry and collaborate with Product and other Engineering teams to turn that vision into a reality. If you want to solve the hard problems that come with scaling event data into the petabyte range, this could be the job for you. In this role you will: Expand EAP's ability to deliver data at world-class speed and reliability. Architect and automate services and systems to scale reliably under growing demand. Make architectural trade-offs that balance product requirements with engineering constraints. Maintain and grow the team's code quality initiatives by regularly reviewing code and contributing to design decisions. Lead design and discussions around deliverables the team is working towards. Improve the maintainability and developer experience of the codebases EAP owns. Exa
$205.3K – $277.5K/yr · Jobiba est.
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. Team: Plaid is becoming an AI-first company, and Intelligent Tooling builds internal platforms and tools to lead the transformation. Our biggest opportunity isn't just better tools for engineers, it's extending AI-native internal tooling to the rest of Plaid. Tools built for engineers assume things non-engineers don't have: local toolchains, monorepos, engineer credentials, PR-based workflows. That mismatch means Ops, Support, and other teams can't easily inherit what we build for engineering. They need their own path and we're building that path. Role: As a Senior Software Engineer on Intelligent Tooling, you will build and operate internal systems that empower non engineering teams to automate their workflows with AI. You will own the product and platform layer for internal tools, including the constraints and infrastructure that keep those tools safe and maintainable. There's no existing playbook for this at Plaid. You will define what the right non-eng AI surface looks like, ship its first durable versions, and partner closely with internal users to make sure it solves real problems. You will act as the engineering point of contact embedded with non-engineering teams, running discovery and trans
$174.5K – $236.1K/yr
Drata is building the trust layer between great companies - automating compliance, managing risk, and helping organizations prove trust continuously as they scale. We're Dratanauts: a global crew of 600+ professionals united by a culture that rewards integrity, ownership, and raising the bar, no matter where in the world we're working from. Why Join the Drata Team? At Drata, you're not maintaining legacy compliance software - you're building the agentic AI platform defining what trust looks like for the next generation of companies. Here's what makes the work itself worth showing up for: Problems without a playbook: You'll work at the edge of AI and security, building agentic governance, continuous compliance, and real-time trust verification to solve problems that don't have an established answer yet. You're writing it as you go. Real ownership, not just process: Our values center on owning outcomes and raising the bar, not checking boxes. You're expected to have opinions and back them. A seat at the table: Your perspective is unique and valued. Open debate and diverse viewpoints are built into how decisions actually get made here, at every level. Growth at rocketship speed: Drata is scaling fast, which means scope grows fast too. High performers get more ownership, visibility, and experience. A crew, not just coworkers: Dratanauts consistently describe a "come as you are" culture with sharp, curious people—the kind of team that makes hard problems genuinely fun to solve. See what they say here and follow us on LinkedIn for company news, employee stories, and career updates. Job Summary: The Senior Software Engineer II helps lead the platform development by making architecture decisions to ensure we're building clean, maintainable, and beautiful applications. This person is responsible for maintaining, expanding, and scaling our APIs that power our web applications. They develop specifications for moderately complex software programming applications and modify/main
$2.4M – $2.9M/yr
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 mission of the Monetization team is to establish our product-led packaging, subscription model, and billing and scale them as we expand and grow our business. Our team is responsible for building robust Billing systems, focusing on payments, renewals, sales tax, and revenue. We also work closely with all the teams to integrate their products with our packaging model thus offering our customers the best features, pricing, and services through self-serve purchases and our Sales channels. We’re looking for an experienced Senior Engineer who will lead our initiatives for a powerful config-driven platform, improving customer purchase experience and working on the internal tools to match the scale of the growth of Postman. What You'll Do Work on our core Monetization platform to improve offer management, including packaging, plans and pricing, which support the pre-purchase workflow and on our Billing platform to improve data capture for revenue recognition and ARR reporting. Lead the active development of our internal services to introduce new frameworks, optimize the APIs, and improve scale and reliability. Contribu
$151K – $205.3K/yr
Drata is building the trust layer between great companies - automating compliance, managing risk, and helping organizations prove trust continuously as they scale. We're Dratanauts: a global crew of 600+ professionals united by a culture that rewards integrity, ownership, and raising the bar, no matter where in the world we're working from. Why Join the Drata Team? At Drata, you're not maintaining legacy compliance software - you're building the agentic AI platform defining what trust looks like for the next generation of companies. Here's what makes the work itself worth showing up for: Problems without a playbook: You'll work at the edge of AI and security, building agentic governance, continuous compliance, and real-time trust verification to solve problems that don't have an established answer yet. You're writing it as you go. Real ownership, not just process: Our values center on owning outcomes and raising the bar, not checking boxes. You're expected to have opinions and back them. A seat at the table: Your perspective is unique and valued. Open debate and diverse viewpoints are built into how decisions actually get made here, at every level. Growth at rocketship speed: Drata is scaling fast, which means scope grows fast too. High performers get more ownership, visibility, and experience. A crew, not just coworkers: Dratanauts consistently describe a "come as you are" culture with sharp, curious people—the kind of team that makes hard problems genuinely fun to solve. See what they say here and follow us on LinkedIn for company news, employee stories, and career updates. Job Summary: The Platform “Senior Software Engineer” will help lead the platform development by making architecture decisions to ensure we're building clean, maintainable, and beautiful applications. This person is responsible for maintaining, expanding, and scaling our platform systems that SCALE our Application Development team. Your “customer” is not Drata’s normal users, it’s developers bot
About the Team The Enterprise Identity team builds the identity foundation that enables organizations to adopt and use OpenAI products securely and reliably. The team owns the enterprise identity stack, including SSO, SCIM, tenant architecture, and identity capabilities across the enterprise admin experience and OpenAI's growing multi-product portfolio. About the Role We are looking for a hands-on senior technical leader to own the architecture and evolution of OpenAI's Enterprise Identity systems. You will set the long-term technical vision for the entire stack, establish shared identity primitives across products, and be accountable for systems that are foundational to our enterprise business. This role requires operating well beyond a single service or feature area. You will identify the most consequential architectural investments, align teams around durable solutions, and ensure our identity platform meets an exceptionally high bar for scale, availability, latency, and security. This role will be based in our San Francisco or Mountain View office. In this role, you will: Own the technical vision and architecture for the Enterprise Identity stack, including SSO, SCIM, tenant architecture, groups, permissions, and identity capabilities in enterprise administration surfaces. Lead the design and evolution of highly available, latency-sensitive identity systems serving a large and diverse global enterprise customer base. Establish common identity models and primitives that work consistently across OpenAI's products and enable the organization to scale. Set a high security bar by anticipating abuse cases, failure modes, and the long-term implications of new capabilities. Drive alignment across enterprise product, infrastructure, and security partners, resolving ambiguity and influencing roadmaps beyond the immediate team. Provide technical leadership to senior engineers and raise the quality of architecture and execution across the broader organization. You might thr
From $200K/yr
We are looking for a talented engineer to lead evaluation of startup acquisition opportunities in the AI, cloud and security space. You will drive product evaluations, prepare and manage technical architecture discussions with target groups in Product and Engineering and provide roadmap suggestions for M&A and investments for Datadog. You will be a key partner to Datadog’s C-level leadership and highly visible at the most senior levels of Datadog. The role is reporting into the Senior Director of Product Strategy and falls within the Product organization. We are looking for an innovative and strategic thinker who is passionate about the latest tech being developed by startups in the cloud, AI and security space. The ideal candidate enjoys researching and evaluating new technologies, works effectively with cross-functional teams, and communicates opinions concisely to our leadership team. Broad understanding of relevant Cloud Technologies and deep understanding of the full coverage of Datadogs current offerings is necessary. The Corporate Development team is small and values authentic, strong-willed individuals who think creatively and proactively. This role leads technical due diligence from a product and architecture perspective across our acquisition pipeline. You'll scope and stand up proof-of-concept and sandbox environments to stress-test candidate products, then give an honest, unvarnished view of their quality and depth - the kind of assessment that holds up regardless of deal momentum. You'll assess technical architecture, flag the risks and open questions that matter most early, and turn that into a clear post-acquisition integration path. Working closely with engineering, you'll keep the evaluation focused on what's actually decision-relevant, then translate the findings into strategic recommendations for leadership and help carry the integration through by partnering with the right people on the other side. What You’l
About the Team OpenAI's research training infrastructure powers how our frontier models are trained and evaluated. The Simulation team sits at the intersection between the agentic harness that powers OpenAI's products and the research infrastructure where GPT-next is trained, ensuring that our model's training environment is as realistic as possible. This team owns the integration layer that connects our production harness capabilities into the training stack. The work is highly cross-functional and high leverage: researchers depend on it to run experiments and evaluations reliably as well as to develop the next generation of harness capabilities. Failures in this surface can materially affect training velocity and correctness. About the Role We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to lead the architecture and evolution of the Simulation Platform. You'll own a critical interface between research and engineering, building the systems, APIs, and operational patterns that let researchers use agentic coding infrastructure safely and effectively in training environments. This role is ideal for a senior backend or infrastructure engineer with strong technical judgment, product sense for highly technical users, and the ability to drive execution across multiple teams. The highest-leverage work is building robust infrastructure that supports and accelerates research without compromising engineering quality. In this role, you will Design, build, and evolve the integration between the Codex harness that powers OpenAI's products and research training infrastructure used for training GPT-next Build a platform for our LLMs to train and be evaluated in simulated environments that mimic their deployment setting as closely as possible, on every axis: agentic harness, compute substrate, timing, tools, data sources, humans in the loop, and more Own major integration surfaces end-to-end, from architecture and API design through rollout, operations, and long-term maintenance Bu
About the Team The Privacy Engineering team builds the systems and technical foundations that govern how user data is understood, retained, accessed, and used across OpenAI. We partner with Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal to translate policy and trust commitments into durable architecture and enforceable controls. Our work spans data inventory and mapping, classification and lineage, retention and deletion, access governance, purpose and usage controls, auditability, and lifecycle automation. We aim to make policy-aligned data handling the default while giving teams clear, reliable primitives for building and operating products at scale. About the Role We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to drive the architecture and execution of user data governance across OpenAI. You will define technical direction, build shared platforms and controls, and lead cross-functional programs that make data flows discoverable, policies enforceable, and ownership explicit. This role is well suited to a senior engineer who can move between deep systems design and organization-wide influence, turn ambiguous requirements into pragmatic roadmaps, and operate high-trust systems end to end. This position is based in San Francisco. Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Set the technical strategy and architecture for user data governance across data mapping, classification, lineage, retention, deletion, access, and permitted usage. Design and build shared services, APIs, metadata systems, and policy-enforcement mechanisms that make governance controls consistent, scalable, and auditable. Establish reliable inventories of user data, system ownership, data flows, and policy applicability across products, infrastructure, analytics, and research systems. Partner with Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal leaders to define decision rights, translate requirements into controls, and drive adoption across teams. Own governance systems
We're looking for a Senior Mechanical Engineer for Midjourney Medical — from precision electromechanical assemblies up to the large-scale structures and mechanisms that hold everything together and make it move. This role spans the full range of scale: one week you might be refining a compact transducer mount, the next you're architecting a structural frame or designing the motion system that positions hardware within it. This is a hands-on role on a small cross-functional team. You'll take problems from whiteboard sketch to working hardware yourself — designing in CAD, prototyping in the shop, testing, iterating, and integrating with research teams, electrical and software engineers along the way. We move fast and expect you to drive your own work: identifying what needs to happen next, making sound engineering calls without waiting for permission, and shipping hardware that works. What you'll do Own parts of the mechanical systems end to end — structures, mechanisms, and electromechanical integration Design large-scale structures: frames, weldments, enclosures, and support systems, with attention to stiffness, weight, manufacturability, and serviceability Design mechanisms: linkages, motion stages, actuation systems for precise, reliable positioning and articulation Integrate transducers, electronics, cabling, and thermal management into large physical systems Perform engineering analysis (tolerance stack-ups, structural/FEA, mechanism kinematics) to de-risk designs before committing to hardware Build and test relentlessly — 3D printing, rapid prototyping, and hands-on fabrication are core to how you'll validate designs Select parts and materials for system-level integration, balancing performance, cost, and lead time Drive projects independently from concept through validation, and collaborate closely with a small cross-disciplinary team to hit project goals What we're looking for Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related field 5+ years of experien
$2.1M – $2.8M/yr
Drata is building the trust layer between great companies - automating compliance, managing risk, and helping organizations prove trust continuously as they scale. We're Dratanauts: a global crew of 600+ professionals united by a culture that rewards integrity, ownership, and raising the bar, no matter where in the world we're working from. Why Join the Drata Team? At Drata, you're not maintaining legacy compliance software - you're building the agentic AI platform defining what trust looks like for the next generation of companies. Here's what makes the work itself worth showing up for: Problems without a playbook: You'll work at the edge of AI and security, building agentic governance, continuous compliance, and real-time trust verification to solve problems that don't have an established answer yet. You're writing it as you go. Real ownership, not just process: Our values center on owning outcomes and raising the bar, not checking boxes. You're expected to have opinions and back them. A seat at the table: Your perspective is unique and valued. Open debate and diverse viewpoints are built into how decisions actually get made here, at every level. Growth at rocketship speed: Drata is scaling fast, which means scope grows fast too. High performers get more ownership, visibility, and experience. A crew, not just coworkers: Dratanauts consistently describe a "come as you are" culture with sharp, curious people—the kind of team that makes hard problems genuinely fun to solve. See what they say here and follow us on LinkedIn for company news, employee stories, and career updates. Job Summary: The Senior Platform Engineer II, AI Tooling on the Developer Experience Team (part of Foundation Engineering group) will lead the design and delivery of the internal AI platform that makes Drata's engineers more efficient - the tools, agents, and integrations that turn AI coding agents (and the rest of the AI dev stack) into a paved road for everyday engineering work. This is not a
About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role We are seeking a senior Actuator Electromagnetic Design Engineer to lead the development of custom electromechanical actuators for advanced robotic systems. You will own actuator development from early architecture and concept generation through prototype validation and system integration, partnering closely with mechanical, electrical, controls, firmware, reliability, and manufacturing teams. This role focuses on the design, integration, and validation of precision electromechanical systems, including motors, transmissions, sensing, structural components, and thermal architectures. You will help drive actuator development across the full engineering lifecycle while establishing scalable design, test, and integration practices for future robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will: Lead the architecture, design, and integration of custom robotic actuators, including the design, simulation, integration and sourcing of custom electromagnetic components. Define actuator requirements and system-level trade studies around torque density, bandwidth, efficiency, thermal performance, inertia, reliability, manufacturability, and cost. Design precision electromechanical assemblies with strong attention to tolerances, alignment, load paths, thermal expansion, sealing, wear, and serviceability. Drive actuator integration into robotic systems, partnering closely with controls, firmware, electrical, and robotics software teams to optimize closed-loop performance. Devel
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