Platform Engineering Director in San Francisco

About Us: AI needs a new infrastructure layer. We're building it at Modal. Every era of computing brought new workloads that previous infrastructure couldn't support: mainframes, databases, and the cloud. Each time, the company that rebuilt the layer underneath defined the decade. AI is no different, except it touches everything instead of one slice, and the window to build the layer underneath it is open right now. Our customers include category-defining companies like Lovable , Ramp , Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno. They rely on Modal for instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage, so it's simple to serve low-latency inference, fine-tune models, and access production-ready sandboxes at scale. We recently raised a $355M Series C at a $4.65B valuation, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures. We've crossed $300M+ ARR and grown fivefold since September. Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g., Seaborn , Luig i ), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience. The Role: We are looking for a strong technical lead to guide the engineers designing, building, and maintaining the novel, high-performance systems that make up our serverless platform. You'll lead the team responsible for the distributed object storage system that underpins every container image, volume, and checkpoint on Modal: hundreds of petabytes of data, replicated across multiple cloud object stores and a CDN, cached on local NVMe across a large fleet of workers in many datacenters, and shared peer-to-peer within each datacenter. You'll set technical direction for the primitives that other teams (filesystems, training, sandboxes) build on, balancing durability, latency, throughput, and cost. You'll own the roadmap from today's hardest problems (garbage collection at petabyte scale, active-active replication, rate limiting that protects the upstream without wasting ut

About VSCO For years, we've helped photographers create their work. Now we're building what comes next. VSCO exists for photographers. Not as a side feature, not as an afterthought, but as the whole point. We build the connected system photographers rely on, and we've spent over a decade earning the trust of a global creative community that takes the craft seriously. Photography is at an inflection point. AI is reshaping what's possible for creative work, and that's where our mission shines. VSCO is building the full photographer's workflow: from creating and editing your work, to delivering it to clients, to running your business. All of it built thoughtfully, with photographers leading the way. We believe the future of photography tools creates more space for creativity, handling the busy work so photographers can focus on the craft. If you care about craft, community, and what technology can unlock for creative people, this is the work. We're a mission-driven and focused company where your work ships quickly, is meaningful, and reaches tens of millions of people worldwide. You'll have a real say in what we build and how we build it. We hire people who don't wait to be asked, naturally connect the dots, care about the quality of what they ship, and believe the best outcomes come from building together. About The Role We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure to own the platform that VSCO product and data teams ship on. You’ll join a small infra team that treats AWS, EKS, and GitOps as the default path for new systems, and you’ll spend real time pairing with other teams so - search, Workspace, and data - land in the right Terraform, Helm, and Flux instead of one-off snowflakes. This is a hands-on senior seat. You will design Terraform modules, cut production traffic to EKS, secure traffic with Cloudflare, look for optimizations in our AWS infrastructure, and leave on-call better than you found them. You like production ownership, you can sequence

About Flexport: At Flexport, we believe global trade can move the human race forward. That’s why it’s our mission to make global commerce so easy there will be more of it. We’re shaping the future of a $10T industry with solutions powered by innovative technology and exceptional people. Today, companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—use Flexport technology to move more than $19B of merchandise across 112 countries a year. The recent global supply chain crisis has put Flexport center stage as we continue to play a pivotal role in how goods move around the world. We are proud to have the support of the best investors in the game who believe in our mission, solutions and people. Ready to tackle global challenges that impact business, society, and the environment? Come join us. The opportunity The Autonomous Freight Systems team is a brand new, AI-first engineering team in San Francisco. This team will own Flexport’s client-facing rates platform and the self-serve freight booking experience—two of the highest-leverage surfaces in our Client App that dictate how clients see pricing and book freight without manual intervention. As a Staff Engineer, you will be the technical anchor for our next-generation AI-powered rates platform. We aren't just building a UI; we are building AI agents that handle real logistics work: parsing complex rate sheets, managing pricing intelligence across ocean, air, and trucking, and making "Self-Serve" a reality for thousands of shippers. You will build the intelligence layer that allows clients to commit freight on technology alone, with no account executive and no operations touch. This is a ground-floor opportunity to shape technical direction, set up a new codebase, and build the platform that moves Flexport from an assisted-sales model to a tech-run one for the long tail of our client base. You will partner with Pricing, Sales, Ops, and Design on hard domain problems and ship to the most-used client

About Flexport: At Flexport, we believe global trade can move the human race forward. That’s why it’s our mission to make global commerce so easy there will be more of it. We’re shaping the future of a $10T industry with solutions powered by innovative technology and exceptional people. Today, companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—use Flexport technology to move more than $19B of merchandise across 112 countries a year. The recent global supply chain crisis has put Flexport center stage as we continue to play a pivotal role in how goods move around the world. We are proud to have the support of the best investors in the game who believe in our mission, solutions and people. Ready to tackle global challenges that impact business, society, and the environment? Come join us. The Opportunity The Autonomous Freight Systems team is a brand new, AI-first engineering team in San Francisco, building Flexport's client-facing rates platform and self-serve freight booking experience from the ground up. We own two of the highest-leverage surfaces in the Client App: how clients see pricing and how they book freight without manual intervention. As a Senior Engineer, you will own significant technical domains end-to-end, not just features, but whole problem spaces. You will drive the engineering of systems that power rate visibility, pricing intelligence, and AI-assisted booking across ocean, air, and trucking. You don't wait to be told what to build next; you identify the highest-leverage problems, propose solutions, and see them through to production. You will be a technical force multiplier on the team: raising the bar on code quality, helping junior engineers grow, and shipping with a velocity and confidence that comes from deep ownership. This is a ground-floor opportunity to build the platform that moves Flexport from an assisted-sales model to a tech-run one for the long tail of our client base—turning the complexity of global trade into a s

About the Team API Enterprise Controls is part of the API Infrastructure organization and owns the platform capabilities that help developers, startups, and enterprises adopt the OpenAI API securely and confidently. We build the systems underneath our APIs and developer platform across authentication and identity, service accounts and key management, secure networking, compliance, auditability, observability, and operational controls. Our users are developers and teams running critical applications on OpenAI, and we partner closely with Product, go-to-market, security, and infrastructure teams to turn their most important needs into reliable, intuitive platform capabilities. About the Role We are looking for an exceptional backend software engineer to help define and ship the enterprise capabilities our API Platform needs to scale.; this is a product-engineering role grounded in deep backend systems. You will work across databases, streaming systems, request routing, authentication, and developer-facing APIs while bringing strong product judgment, developer empathy, and attention to the small details that make a platform easier to understand, trust, and operate. You will lead large cross-functional initiatives, work closely with Product and go-to-market teams, engage directly with sophisticated users, and carry ambiguous needs from discovery through design, launch, and iteration. In this role, you will: Own backend product capabilities end to end across authentication and identity, service accounts and key controls, secure networking, compliance, observability, and operational workflows. Partner with Product, go-to-market, security, infrastructure teams, and sophisticated customers to identify needs, shape the roadmap, and lead large cross-functional projects from design through launch. Design developer-facing APIs, system behavior, configuration, error handling, safe defaults, auditing, and notifications with exceptional care for the details that define a great dev

About the Team API Agents builds the shared agent harness, tools, and infrastructure that turn OpenAI’s frontier models into systems that can reliably complete real work. We carry the capabilities behind Codex into a much broader set of products and workflows across software engineering, research, finance, healthcare, enterprise operations, and more. Our work spans search and connected context, computer use, memory, delegation and multi-agent coordination, and safe execution. Sitting at the intersection of Research, Codex, infrastructure, and applied product teams, we build reusable agent capabilities that compound across the ecosystem. About the Role We are looking for an experienced backend software engineer to build the core systems behind the next generation of agents. You will design reliable services and abstractions that help agents find the right context, use tools and computers, retain knowledge, coordinate over long-running workflows, and take action safely. The role combines deep backend and infrastructure work with strong product judgment, with opportunities to work across agent runtimes, orchestration, search, execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, and evaluations. This is software and systems engineering rather than model training: success comes from strong backend fundamentals, high agency, and the ability to turn fast-moving research capabilities into dependable production primitives. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate the shared agent harness and backend infrastructure that power long-running, high-value workflows across OpenAI and third-party products. Build reusable capabilities across search and connected context, computer use, memory, tool execution, delegation, subagents, and multi-agent orchestration. Establish the foundations agents need to operate safely in production, including secure execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, evaluations, reliability, and cost and latency effi

Who We Are Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together . We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. About the Role: As a Software Engineer on Collections Infra, you’ll help scale the infrastructure behind Notion’s database block. Databases power views, boards, charts, forms, and the workflows customers use to run their companies; as Notion grows into larger enterprise deployments and AI-native work, those systems need to become faster, more reliable, and ready for much higher concurrency. This team sits between infrastructure and product, building backend architecture that improves the customer experience while becoming a platform other Notion teams can build on. You’ll work on problems like database load performance, microservices, high-volume writes from agents, and the flexibility that makes Notion databases powerful and hard to scale. This role can be based in either San Francisco or New York City. We work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays (our Anchor Days) because we do our best thinking and building together in person. We’re looking for someone who’s excited to work alongside the team during those days. What You'll Achieve: By your 90th day, you’ll understand how Collections Infra supports Notion’s database

About the Team OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. The API Platform turns frontier research into reliable capabilities that developers use to build transformative products and services for people around the world. API Safety's goal is to ensure safe deployment of frontier models in the API. We design APIs and systems that help developers share usage context, understand safety events, and apply safeguards tailored to the risk profile of the applications they are building. This work is critical to our frontier model launches and partners closely with teams across API, Integrity, and Safety Research. About the Role We're looking for product-minded software engineers to join a team that is addressing emerging risks at the frontier of model development while building novel solutions for real-world AI deployment. The day-to-day work ranges from solving production challenges to designing new product experiences and safeguards. The right candidate is comfortable balancing tradeoffs across developer experience, latency, reliability, and risk. In this role, you will: Design and build dashboards and APIs for safety controls and customer-facing observability. Develop scalable systems that extend trusted safety capabilities to new use cases, customers, and deployment environments. Partner with Safety Research and Integrity to build safeguards that mitigate emerging risks. Be responsible for the availability, latency, and scalability of safeguards across high-volume API traffic. Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while raising the team’s engineering standards Your background might look something like: 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles. A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems. Strong s

About the Team API Multimodal builds the developer-facing products and infrastructure that bring OpenAI’s image, audio, and real-time model capabilities into the world. We are responsible for high-scale APIs for image generation, speech transcription, speech generation, and low-latency voice interactions. We partner closely with Research and Inference to bring frontier model capabilities to developers and use customer feedback to improve our models. About the Role As a software engineer on API Multimodal, you will build and operate the products and distributed systems behind OpenAI’s image, audio, and real-time APIs. You will work across model integration, API design, and production infrastructure to turn new research capabilities into reliable developer experiences. This hands-on role combines backend and systems depth with product judgment: you will own projects end to end, partner with Research, Inference, and Safety, and help make multimodal AI useful at scale. Model training experience is not required. In this role, you will: Design, build, and ship developer-facing APIs and backend services that serve frontier models. Architect low-latency streaming, request, session, and model integration systems that make complex multimodal interactions reliable and intuitive at scale. Work directly with Research to bring new model capabilities into production, shape the systems around them, and incorporate feedback from real-world developers and customers. Own the availability, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency of the services you build. Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while raising the team’s engineering standards. Your background might look something like: 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles. A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed syste

About the Team Platform Partnerships builds and grows the relationships that extend OpenAI products through the world’s most important technology platforms. The team works across Product, Engineering, Research, Go-to-Market, Legal, Finance, Marketing, Policy, and Operations to turn partner opportunities into durable product experiences and business outcomes. We’re hiring a Partner Manager, Monetization to help build, scale, and manage a portfolio of strategic platform and monetization partnerships. You will drive day-to-day strategy and execution, help shape joint roadmaps and commercial opportunities, and translate shared ambition into measurable adoption, usage, revenue, distribution, and product impact. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role for a skilled generalist who can move between partnership strategy and detailed execution. You will own day-to-day execution across priority relationships, collaborate with senior partnership leads and cross-functional teams, create structure where playbooks are still emerging, make sound decisions with incomplete information, and step into the product, commercial, and operating details required to move work forward. In this role, you will: Drive day-to-day partnership strategy and execution across priority partners, working closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Go-to-Market, Legal, Finance, Marketing, Policy, and Operations to align roadmaps and deliver outcomes. Own a portfolio of strategic partnerships as businesses: set direction, prioritize opportunities, and drive outcomes aligned with OpenAI’s product and company goals. Contribute to multi-year expansion strategies and joint plans that connect product roadmaps, commercial opportunities, go-to-market motions, and measurable outcomes. Support complex deal execution and commercial negotiations from partner evaluation through product integration, launch, expansion, and renewal. Operate as a cross-functional driver, aligning internal teams and external partne

About the team Platform Partnerships builds and grows the relationships that extend OpenAI products through the world’s most important technology platforms. The team works across Product, Engineering, Research, Go-to-Market, Legal, Finance, Marketing, Policy, and Operations to turn partner opportunities into durable product experiences and business outcomes. We are a small team working on opportunities that rarely arrive with a playbook. We set the strategy, make the tradeoffs, and stay close to execution through launch and scale. About the role We’re hiring a Strategic Partner Manager to own and drive the expansion of a portfolio of OpenAI’s most strategic platform partnerships. You will treat each partnership as a business: set the expansion thesis, align joint product roadmaps, structure commercial opportunities, and translate shared ambition into measurable adoption, usage, revenue, distribution, and product impact. This is a senior individual-contributor role with full-lifecycle ownership—from strategy and negotiation through integration, launch, performance, expansion, and renewal. It is a 0-to-1 builder role, not a coordination role. You will create clarity where the operating model is still emerging, make sound decisions with incomplete information, and step into the details required to move the work forward. The right person can move fluidly between a multi-year partnership strategy and the immediate product, commercial, or operating blocker in front of the team. You will build trusted relationships at the executive and working levels while representing OpenAI’s priorities with clarity and thoughtful pushback. What success looks like Each priority partner has a clear expansion thesis, joint roadmap, governance model, and measurable outcomes. High-priority product integrations and go-to-market initiatives launch with clear ownership, strong readiness, and fewer unresolved dependencies. Partnerships show measurable growth across the outcomes that matter for t

About the Role The Engineering Acceleration Delivery / Continuous Deployment team builds and operates the systems that safely ship OpenAI’s infrastructure and product code to production. We own the deployment platform, release pipelines, and rollout safety mechanisms that allow engineers across OpenAI to deploy changes rapidly while minimizing operational risk. Our mission is to make production deployments fast, safe, and increasingly autonomous. This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, distributed systems reliability, and large-scale infrastructure orchestration. In This Role, You Will Design and build continuous deployment infrastructure that safely rolls out changes across dozens of Kubernetes clusters and global regions. Develop systems for progressive delivery, including canary releases, staged rollouts, and automated rollback. Improve engineering velocity by reducing friction in the release pipeline and automating manual operational workflows. Work with product and infrastructure teams to ensure their services are deployable, observable, and resilient at scale. Implement and evolve deployment methodologies such as GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, and progressive delivery patterns. Build systems that automatically evaluate deployment health using metrics, logs, traces, and alerts to detect regressions and trigger safe rollbacks. Build systems that support agent-assisted or autonomous deployment workflows using modern AI tooling. Technologies commonly used in this environment include: Kubernetes for large-scale container orchestration and runtime infrastructure Python and FastAPI for internal services Terraform for infrastructure as code GitOps-based deployment workflows (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux, or similar systems) Buildkite for CI orchestration You may be a strong fit if you: Have worked with Kubernetes-based deployment systems at scale Have experience building or operating continuous deployment platforms Are familiar with GitOps tooling such as

About the Team The Finance Platform & Technology team builds and scales the systems and data architecture that power OpenAI’s core financial operations. We enable business agility, compliance, and operational excellence across procure-to-pay, quote-to-cash, supply chain, financial planning, and asset management. We partner with Procurement, Accounting, Tax, Legal, Security, Data, and Engineering to modernize workflows through thoughtful platform design, reliable integrations, scalable automation, and trusted data. About the Role As a Business Systems Lead for Procure-to-Pay, you will be a hands-on engineer who designs, builds, and operates the integrations and first-party applications that power OpenAI’s procurement workflows. You will translate business needs into secure, scalable software, APIs, data flows, and automation across Oracle Fusion, Zip, and connected platforms. You will build the future of buying at OpenAI using OpenAI’s own technology, from guided intake and approval experiences to supplier onboarding, purchasing, receiving, invoicing, and downstream financial data flows. You will own the technical roadmap and support model for these capabilities, improving today’s platforms while deciding where to integrate, configure, or build as OpenAI scales. Your core strength will be software and integration engineering. You will personally write code, troubleshoot cross-system failures, and take solutions through testing, deployment, and production support. You will also make targeted functional configurations in procurement platforms and partner with functional specialists on deeper process and module design. 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, build, and operate integrations across Oracle Fusion, Zip, and connected systems using APIs, events, messaging, and batch interfaces where appropriate. Build first-party

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 Security Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) team is part of Plaid’s security organization, focused on enabling the business by proactively managing information security risks and maintaining effective controls. Our mission is to reduce the likelihood and impact of security risks while operating a robust assurance program that builds trust with our customers, consumers, and data partners. We own Plaid’s security compliance frameworks, run our audits and risk programs, and partner across the company to keep Plaid’s platform secure, resilient, and aligned with industry and regulatory expectations. GRC Engineering is how we make all of that scale — turning compliance into code, evidence into telemetry, and audits into a continuous, automated capability. The Role: You will own GRC Engineering at Plaid — a foundational, high-ownership role defining an emerging discipline from the ground up. Today most of our compliance work is manual and point-in-time; you will turn it into an engineered system that is continuous, data-driven, and scalable, and set the technical direction for the field. You will: Define the discipline and the architecture — how GRC Engineering works at Plaid, not just execute with

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