About the Team OpenAI's Legal team plays a crucial role in furthering OpenAI's mission by tackling innovative, fundamental legal issues in AI. If you're passionate about doing significant and unique work as a technology lawyer, this team is for you. The team comprises legal professionals from diverse fields, including technology, privacy, IP, corporate, cybersecurity, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation. About the Role We’re growing our world-class Legal team and seek an experienced counsel to lead our global hardware IP portfolio initiatives, including patent, trademark and other intellectual property matters related to our business. This role is highly cross-functional across OpenAI, including work across our Legal, Communications, Global Affairs, Product, Research and Executive teams. 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: Own global hardware IP initiatives, including setting and executing on the strategic direction and management of our hardware IP portfolio. Create scalable processes internally and externally with outside counsel to build, maintain and protect our hardware IP portfolio. Developing and maintaining internal hardware IP policies and programs. Engaging externally on hardware IP policy issues. Advising on strategic hardware IP deals. Advising on hardware IP issues, ranging from patent, trademark, trade secret to open source. Developing and building internal AI expertise, processes and tools to facilitate legal team work. Experience advising on complex technology transactions and inbound technology licensing. You might thrive in this role if you: Have at least 10+ years of combined hardware IP experience at innovative technology companies and law firms. Have a JD and license or qualification to practice in CA. Have a strong sense of ownership, are inquisitive and enthusiastic about technology, enjoy being con
Jobs in United States
Lead Senior Software Engineer Distributed Systems in San Francisco
419 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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$277.5K – $277.5K/yr
Based on 15 salary observations
About the Team The GTM Data Science team partners with Go-to-Market, Technical Success, Product, Engineering, RevOps, and Strategic Finance to build the shared intelligence layer for OpenAI's B2B business. The team turns product usage, customer behavior, revenue, field activity, and customer feedback into rigorous insight products that help leaders and field teams understand where customers are succeeding, where adoption is blocked, and what actions will accelerate durable growth. We are building systems that make customer intelligence proactive: surfacing risk, expansion potential, product gaps, and repeatable playbooks before they show up as escalations or missed opportunities. About the Role As the Applied Data Science & Insights Lead for GTM Intelligence Solutions and Technical Success, you will be a hands-on technical leader responsible for shaping how OpenAI measures, understands, and improves customer adoption across our B2B products. You will build AI/ML-powered intelligence products that connect account health, product usage, customer lifecycle, support tier, qualitative sentiment, commercial context, and field actions into a practical operating system for GTM and Technical Success. This role will build the data science foundation for Technical Success: defining the metrics, models, operating insights, and decision systems that help the team scale customer adoption and expansion with rigor. You will also be expected to build and lead a small mighty team over time: setting direction, hiring and developing talent, creating operating cadences, and holding a high bar for technical rigor and business impact. You will lead the development of models, metrics, and decision systems that recommend what GTM and Technical Success teams should do next, explain why, and measure whether those interventions worked. Your work will help customers move from pilots to production, deepen usage across products, identify high-value use cases, reduce churn risk, and create a f
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. Role Overview We are seeking a Package Reliability Engineer to lead reliability engineering for advanced packages used in high-performance AI and computing systems. The primary focus of this role is to assess package level mechanical and thermal reliability risks and apply thermal and mechanical modeling to optimize package design, material selection, and assembly processes. The engineer will also develop reliability test plans with external partners, identify failure mechanisms, perform root-cause analysis, and recommend practical corrective actions. In this role, you will assess package reliability risks from early architecture development through product qualification and high-volume manufacturing. You will work closely with package design, silicon design, system engineering, manufacturing, and ASIC partners to predict package behavior, develop qualification strategies, resolve reliability issues, and improve overall package robustness and lifetime. In this role you will: Lead reliability test plan and assessments for advanced HPC packages, including risk identification, potential failure-mechanism analysis, root-cause investigation, mitigation planning, and corrective-action development. Drive reliability-focused package design optimization based on thermo-mechanical modeling to improve package reliability, power integrity, thermal performance, mechanical robustness, and platform scalability. Develop, validate, and apply package reliability models and lifetime-prediction
About the team The Applied team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. About the role: We're seeking a Data Engineer to take the lead in building our data pipelines and core tables for OpenAI. These pipelines are crucial for powering analyses, safety systems that guide business decisions, product growth, and prevent bad actors. If you're passionate about working with data and are eager to create solutions with significant impact, we'd love to hear from you. This role also provides the opportunity to collaborate closely with the researchers behind ChatGPT and help them train new models to deliver to users. As we continue our rapid growth, we value data-driven insights, and your contributions will play a pivotal role in our trajectory. Join us in shaping the future of OpenAI! In this role, you will: Design, build and manage our data pipelines, ensuring all user event data is seamlessly integrated into our data warehouse. Develop canonical datasets to track key product metrics including user growth, engagement, and revenue. Work collaboratively with various teams, including, Infrastructure, Data Science, Product, Marketing, Finance, and Research to understand their data needs and provide solutions. Implement robust and fault-tolerant systems for data ingestion and processing. Participate in data architecture and engineering decisions, bringing your strong experience and knowledge to bear. Ensure the security, integrity, and compliance of data according to industry and company standards. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 3+ years of experience as a data engineer and 8+ years of any software engineering experience(including data engineering). Proficiency in at least one programming language commonl
About the Team OpenAI’s Strategic Finance organization provides financial insights and guidance to support the company’s long-term strategy and ambitious growth. We partner across Product, Partnerships, Engineering, and GTM to allocate resources to the highest-impact opportunities while protecting sustainable unit economics. The Applications Technology Strategic Finance team partners closely with Product to scale core offerings and bring new products to market. We lead revenue forecasting and performance management across the product portfolio, including economic margins, pricing, and partnership deal pricing and structuring. About the Role We are hiring on our Strategic Finance Partnerships team to drive strategic decision-making across OpenAI’s growth and media partnership portfolio, focused on our consumer business. This role will be a critical finance partner to Partnerships deal leads and Product owners, responsible for evaluating, pricing, and structuring partnerships, and translating partner opportunity into decision-ready economics and performance management. The role will be hands-on in deal evaluation, negotiation support, and portfolio oversight. You will shape how OpenAI approaches partnership unit economics, measurement and incrementality, and how partnership performance is incorporated into forecasts and planning. 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: Own financial evaluation for growth and media partnerships, including modeling revenue, margin, compute, and payback to support decision-making and negotiations. Develop clear economic frameworks and deal guardrails (pricing floors, rev-share structures, caps, minimum guarantees, performance-based terms) to protect long-term unit economics. Partner closely with Product and Partnerships to define and measure incrementality and ensure contract terms align with measurable outcomes. Lead partnershi
About the Team The Corporate Security team is responsible for safeguarding all OpenAI employees and executives. Our mission is to create a secure, resilient environment that allows our teams to focus on their work without risk or disruption. We manage physical security operations across offices, events, and global initiatives, partnering closely with internal teams and external agencies to stay ahead of emerging threats. About the Role As a Corporate Security Manager , based in our San Francisco office, you will lead day-to-day security operations while supporting the development of global physical security strategies, policies, and procedures. You will work cross-functionally to maintain a strong and adaptive security posture, manage vendor security teams, and serve as a key liaison with law enforcement and security partners. This position requires hands-on experience in corporate security operations. This role typically involves 4–5 days in the office each week . In this role, you will: Office Security: Develop, implement, and manage physical security measures, including policies, systems, and vendor relationships, to protect employees and visitors in the San Francisco offices. International Offices: Support the International Director to safeguard OpenAI’s global footprint by assisting with security policy writing, consistent with US and main office policy and procedures, including ongoing mitigation strategies. Events: Support local events when needed and work with the resilience team on updating policy and procedures that involve the GSOC’s support. Partnerships & Stakeholder Engagement: Establish and strengthen relationships with local law enforcement agencies, peer security organizations, and other external partners to stay current on emerging risks. Policy Development & Compliance: Be the primary point of contact for the Corporate Security Operations team for global policy and procedures. Support and contribute to all the Corp Sec pillars as needed, f
About the Team OpenAI’s Strategic Finance organization provides the financial insight and guidance that support the company’s long-term strategy and ambitious growth. We partner across Product, Partnerships, Engineering, and GTM to allocate resources to the highest-impact opportunities while preserving sustainable unit economics. The Applications Technology Strategic Finance team works closely with Product and Engineering to scale core offerings and bring new products to market. We lead revenue forecasting and performance management across the product portfolio, and partner closely with the Infrastructure Engineering team to forecast infrastructure and compute demand and to manage margin targets and headcount planning with rigor. About the Role We are hiring a Director of Product Finance, Infrastructure and Compute Demand to help drive strategic decision-making across our product organization. This person will serve as the primary finance partner to the AGI Deployment (Applications) Infrastructure Engineering organization and play a critical role in connecting product usage, compute demand, infrastructure costs, and margin outcomes across the portfolio. You will help build the frameworks that translate technical decisions into economic outcomes, shape planning across product and infrastructure teams, and ensure OpenAI is scaling its products with rigor and efficiency. You will also manage a small team, providing mentorship and leadership while remaining hands-on with analysis and execution. This role is ideally based in our San Francisco HQ, but we are open to NYC and Seattle. 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: Serve as the primary finance partner to the AGI Deployment (Applications) Infrastructure Engineering organization. Own the consolidated compute and infrastructure demand forecast for the products we bring to market, partnering closely with capacity planning and
About the Team The Employee Technology & Experience (ETX) team is responsible for delivering a world-class internal technology experience that enables employees to do their best work. We support and operate the employee-facing systems that keep the company moving quickly and efficiently. ETX spans support, logistics, AV, identity, endpoints, SaaS administration, automation, enterprise tooling, and internal infrastructure operations. We partner closely with Security, Engineering, Workplace, Finance, People, and other teams to keep OpenAI’s internal technology reliable, scalable, and moving at the pace of the company. About the Role We are hiring a Program Manager to help scale how IT operates across OpenAI. This role will lead complex cross-functional programs that improve operational maturity, streamline how teams work together, and turn high-impact initiatives into durable operational capabilities. You will work across IT, Security, Engineering, Workplace, and other functions to drive alignment, remove friction, and help build the operational foundation needed to support OpenAI’s rapid growth. You’ll be responsible for: Lead cross-functional operational programs that improve scalability, consistency, and operational maturity. Drive operational excellence initiatives across IT Support, employee lifecycle operations, meeting room and calendaring services, onsite support, vending, and research support environments. Build operating models, readiness plans, escalation paths, governance cadences, and success metrics for complex operational programs. Partner with technical teams to ensure new deployments, infrastructure investments, and internal platforms are operationally ready and sustainably supported at scale. Drive high-priority operational programs supporting company growth, including infrastructure expansion, operational integrations, and other emerging initiatives. Improve operational visibility, stakeholder alignment, and coordination across long-running cros
About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to ensure the responsible and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. In support of that mission, the Marketing team helps deeply understand customer audiences and market dynamics, influence the development of the right products, build sustainable and customer-aligned monetization models, and drive awareness, adoption, and usage across OpenAI’s products and platform. We take a data-driven approach to understand markets, develop monetization strategies, and uncover customer needs that shape product strategy and messaging. We partner closely with Sales, Partnerships, Product, Engineering, Research, Comms, and Design to deliver a cohesive end-to-end customer experience and lead go-to-market efforts for new product launches across channels. About the Role We are hiring a Head of Enterprise Ads Marketing to define and scale OpenAI’s global marketing strategy for enterprise advertisers, agencies, and strategic brand partners. This leader will own how advertisers understand, evaluate, adopt, and grow with OpenAI’s advertising solutions. This is a highly strategic and hands-on leadership role where you will shape the narratives that position OpenAI as a premium advertising platform for the world’s marketers while building the content, thought leadership, events, and demand programs that drive pipeline and long-term strategic growth. You will partner closely with Sales, Partnerships, Product, Finance, Legal, Communications, Research, and Data Science to help establish OpenAI as a trusted leader in the future of AI-powered advertising. This role is ideally based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid schedule of three days per week in the office. In This Role, You Will: Define the end-to-end enterprise advertiser marketing strategy across awareness, consideration, pipeline creation, adoption, expansion, and long-term growth. Develop OpenAI’s enterprise advertising narratives, positioning, and messaging architecture across AI-powered mar
About the Team: OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our API is the industry's most widely adopted AI platform, empowering startups, indie developers, and Fortune 500 companies alike. Through multimodal APIs—spanning real-time interactions, text-to-speech (TTS), speech generation, and image generation—we enable users to harness the full potential of diverse AI modalities effectively and at scale. About the Role: We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our multimodal API product suite. Your team will be responsible for delivering innovative APIs across real-time processing, speech transcription, speech generation, and image creation. You will own the product roadmap for how we evolve our multimodal API offerings, and you will build the products that allow developers to reach millions of end users through AI audio, video, and images. In this role, you will: Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team focused on multimodal API products – including our realtime API, our transcription models (Whisper), our speech generation models (TTS), and our image generation APIs (DALLE and native 4o). Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to define the strategic vision and product roadmap. Work closely with our research teams to improve our core multimodal models for API customer use cases. Guide technical and architectural decisions, emphasizing scalability, robustness, and user experience. Foster a culture of innovation, continuous improvement, and accountability within your team. Qualifications: Proven experience managing engineering teams that deliver complex, high-quality products at scale. Strong technical background and proficiency in modern software engineering practices and system architecture. Excellent collaboration and communication skills to effectively coordinate across diverse teams and stakeholders. Familiarity with or strong interest in multimoda
About the Team The team’s mission is to accelerate the secure evolution of agentic AI systems at OpenAI. To achieve this, the team designs, implements, and continuously refines security policies, frameworks, and controls that defend OpenAI’s most critical assets—including the user and customer data embedded within them—against the unique risks introduced by agentic AI. About the Role As a Security Engineer on the Agent Security Team , you will be at the forefront of securing OpenAI’s cutting-edge agentic AI systems. Your role will involve designing and implementing robust security frameworks, policies, and controls to safeguard OpenAI’s critical assets and ensure the safe deployment of agentic systems. You will develop comprehensive threat models, partner tightly with our Agent Infrastructure group to fortify the platforms that power OpenAI’s most advanced agentic systems, and lead efforts to enhance safety monitoring pipelines at scale. We are looking for a versatile engineer who thrives in ambiguity and can make meaningful contributions from day one. You should be prepared to ship solutions quickly while maintaining a high standard of quality and security. We’re looking for people who can drive innovative solutions that will set the industry standard for agent security. You will need to bring your expertise in securing complex systems and designing robust isolation strategies for emerging AI technologies, all while being mindful of usability. You will communicate effectively across various teams and functions, ensuring your solutions are scalable and robust while working collaboratively in an innovative environment. In this fast-paced setting, you will have the opportunity to solve complex security challenges, influence OpenAI’s security strategy, and play a pivotal role in advancing the safe and responsible deployment of agentic AI systems. You’ll be responsible for: Architecting security controls for agentic AI – design, implement, and iterate on identity, netwo
About the Team OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is building the world’s most advanced AI compute infrastructure ecosystem. The InfraDev team is central to this mission, setting the strategy and executing the roadmap to scale our supercomputing footprint globally. From site planning to system integration, this team operates at the intersection of commercial, technical, and operational excellence, partnering with leaders across OpenAI and the industry. About the Role We are seeking a Strategic Sourcing Manager who is ready to take on global-scale challenges in AI compute supply and manufacturing — an opportunity to shape the future of supercomputing. As part of the Infrastructure Strategy & Delivery organization supporting Industrial Compute, OpenAI’s next-generation supercomputing platform, you will lead sourcing and strategic supplier engagements for compute infrastructure at hyperscale. This role will drive commercial strategy and supplier accountability across server platforms, accelerators, rack systems, and associated thermal & power delivery components. This is not traditional procurement — it is foundational work enabling OpenAI to deploy compute faster and more efficiently than anyone in the world, while building deeply-integrated partnerships with the global compute supply chain. Key Responsibilities Develop and execute sourcing strategies for the next generation of AI compute infrastructure in partnership with engineering and program leadership. Stay at the leading edge of industry and supply-chain trends to inform category strategy and long-range planning. Initiate, negotiate, and manage commercial agreements across OEM/ODM/JDMs for accelerators, GPUs/CPUs, server platforms, rack systems, liquid-cooling components, PSUs, and supporting mechanical/electrical subsystems. Secure capacity and optionality across a rapidly scaling compute supply chain while mitigating risk and ensuring manufacturing readiness. Partner cross-funct
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 OpenAI's Hardware organization builds supercompute platforms from silicon and boards to full rack-scale systems to power advanced AI workloads. This role owns end-to-end quality for high-speed interconnect hardware across the product lifecycle: early design influence, supplier/contract manufacturer readiness, qualification, ramp, and fleet quality in lab and data center environments. You will be the quality lead for advanced interconnect components and assemblies, including high-speed copper cables, cable cartridges, patch panels, backplane/cable-backplane solutions, high-speed connectors, and related electro-mechanical interfaces. You will partner closely with electrical, mechanical, SI/PI, systems, reliability, operations, and external vendors to prevent escapes and drive rapid, data-driven containment and corrective action. In this role you will: Own quality for advanced interconnect components and assemblies: high-speed connectors, high-speed copper cables, cable cartridges (e.g., cable cassette style assemblies), patch panels & optics, and backplane/cable-backplane interconnect solutions. Drive quality-by-design: participate in design reviews, DFM/DFx, tolerance stacks, material and plating selections, connector mating strategy, strain relief, and assembly methods to reduce variation and field failures. Define and track quality and reliability metrics (DPPM, yield, escapes, RMA/FRACAS trends, Cpk/Ppk where applicable) for interconnects across NPI and m
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 Mechanical Engineer to lead the engineering, characterization, and productionization of flexible and compliant components in robotic platforms. You will partner closely with cross-functional teams to translate material concepts into engineered subsystems that meet functional, durability, and manufacturing requirements. This role focuses on understanding how soft materials behave in dynamic mechanical systems — including fatigue, creep, hysteresis, wear, and environmental degradation — and designing assemblies that perform consistently at scale. You will work with materials such as elastomers, foams, thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPUs), engineered fabrics, knitted and woven textiles, cables, and other flexible load-bearing or transmission elements, integrating them with rigid hardware, sensors, and actuators using fabrication methods such as bonding, molding, lamination, and sewn assemblies. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Design and integrate compliant or flexible materials into mechanical subsystems and rigid hardware interfaces. Leverage FEA tools to characterize material behavior under operational loads, including tension, compression, abrasion, fatigue, and environmental exposure. Develop test methods and validation protocols to evaluate durability, performance, and failure modes of soft components. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to transition early prototypes into manufacturable designs. Source and evaluate materials in collaboratio
About the Team OpenAI’s Legal team plays a crucial role in advancing our mission by tackling innovative and fundamental legal issues in AI. The team includes professionals from diverse legal fields – technology, AI, infrastructure, privacy, IP, corporate, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation – who collaborate closely with colleagues across the company. If you are passionate about being a technology lawyer working on cutting-edge challenges, you’ll thrive here. About the Role We are seeking an experienced commercial attorney to join our commercial legal team. Based in the US, you will help lead commercial legal support for OpenAI’s rapidly growing business, working with teams such as GTM, Partnerships, Procurement, Finance, Product, Infrastructure, and Engineering. This is a great opportunity to join OpenAI’s commercial legal team, negotiating high-impact agreements and helping to build scalable frameworks for responsible growth. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. In this role, you will: Serve as the legal partner for OpenAI’s business transactions, partnerships, and operations. Provide practical, business-oriented legal advice to teams including Sales, Partnerships, Finance, Procurement, and Operations. Identify and address commercial, product, regulatory, privacy, and other legal issues arising from commercial transactions. Develop strategies and processes for handling legal issues in creative and scalable ways that support growth. Monitor and advise on regulatory and compliance matters affecting AI and technology. Collaborate with colleagues across OpenAI’s global legal team to ensure alignment across jurisdictions. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 7+ years of experience across in-house and technology-focused law firm roles. Bring a strong background in drafting and negotiating complex commercial contracts. Are comfortable operating in an entrepreneurial environment, and are proact
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