Software Engineer L2 Cloud Infrastructure Salary Guide in United States

About the Team The Core Services team is responsible for building and managing foundational services. It acts as the bridge between core infrastructure (e.g. compute, storage, networking) and product engineering teams, and enables product teams to move fast, build reliably, and scale efficiently. About the Role As a software engineer in the core services team, you will design and operate critical backend platforms such as caching systems, workflow orchestration, metadata stores, and file services. You’ll focus on building highly reliable, scalable, and performant systems that serve as the backbone of our products. We’re looking for people who are passionate about building infrastructure that empowers product teams, love working on distributed systems challenges, and enjoy creating well-designed APIs and abstractions that accelerate development. 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 maintain shared infrastructure services such as caching layers, workflow orchestration (Temporal), metadata stores, and file storage services. Collaborate with product teams to provide scalable, reliable primitives that abstract the complexities of distributed systems. Improve performance, resilience, and scalability of core services that power customer-facing applications. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience with distributed systems, caching infrastructure (e.g., Redis, Memcached), metadata storage (e.g., FoundationDB), or workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal, Cadence). Have experience running containerized services in cloud environments and integrating them into automated build/test/release (CI/CD) workflows. Understand trade-offs in consistency models, replication strategies, and performance optimization in multi-region systems. Excel at communication and collaboration with cross-functional teams, and are obsesse

About the Team The OpenAI 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 As a Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design, build, and operate some of the largest distributed data systems in the world. You will be responsible for the end-to-end stack to deliver and consume top-quality data for robotics training at exabyte-scale. You’ll manage distributed data pipelines, collaborate closely with researchers to translate requirements into robust systems, and harden pipelines that serve as the backbone for OpenAI’s rapid iteration cycles. We’re looking for engineers who are detail-oriented, have strong experience with distributed systems, and excel at building reliable, large-scale systems in high-stakes environments. 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 maintain data infrastructure such as exabyte-scale distributed data processing, data selection, automated labeling, and training data loaders. Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient. Partner with researchers to deeply understand requirements and translate them into production-ready systems. Harden, optimize, and maintain critical data infrastructure systems that power multimodal training and evaluation. Deliver the best possible data for training robotics models. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong experience with distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure with a strong interest in data. Are detail-oriented a

About the Team The Fleet team builds core components to enable productive research from small to state of the art scale across OpenAI, with the goal of accelerating progress towards AGI. We frequently collaborate with other teams to speed up the development of new state-of-the-art capabilities. About the Role As we scale up with more researchers and engineers joining OpenAI, we seek a pragmatic and passionate engineer with a strong focus on the development experience for both engineers and scientists. In this role, you will be responsible for building and maintaining systems that allow our research + engineering organization to iteratively develop, test, and deploy new features reliably, with high velocity, and with a frictionless and fast development cycle. You will help oversee and drive to the vision of how we should build, test and deploy software. You will drive the design of our continuous integration pipelines, testing infrastructure, training and support around our build system. Our current environment relies heavily on Python, Rust, and C++, which you will take ownership of and strive to transform into a state of the art development experience for research. Ultimately, your role will be to provide the necessary tools and metrics to support our fast-paced culture and ensure a stable, scalable platform for growth, while also fostering a seamless and low friction experience for OpenAI’s research. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. For a San Francisco role, we use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. You might thrive in this role if you: Have supported large monorepo development and deployment before Are a proficient Python programmer working in large monorepos Are proficient with Docker and Kubernetes Experienced in CI/CD 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 boun

About the Team With Codex we’re building an AI software engineer. One that you can pair with, delegate to, or even ask to take on future tasks proactively. Our team is a fast-moving group within OpenAI, bringing together research, engineering, design, and product. We iteratively build the Codex agent harness and product to get the most out of the model, and we iteratively train the model to be great at complex software engineering tasks. The Codex team is responsible for building state-of-the-art AI systems that can write code, reason about software, and act as intelligent agents for developers and non-developers alike. We operate across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure; owning the full lifecycle of experimentation, deployment, and iteration on novel coding capabilities. Codex Enterprise builds the ecosystem, governance, and enterprise capabilities that help Codex spread across developers, teams, and organizations worldwide. The Enterprise Controls team owns the systems that allow companies to safely deploy Codex across their organization while protecting their most sensitive code, data, and internal knowledge. About the Role As Codex adoption grows inside large organizations, customers are increasingly trusting Codex with their most valuable assets: proprietary codebases, internal documentation, customer data, and sensitive workflows. This role will help build the enterprise control plane that makes Codex secure, governable, and trustworthy at scale. You will design and operate backend systems that give enterprise administrators visibility and control over how Codex is used across their organization. You will work across identity, access, encryption, policy enforcement, auditability, and admin controls. This may include systems that let customers manage encryption keys, control which Codex capabilities are enabled, enforce organizational policies, and understand how data flows through Codex. This role owns systems end-to-end: from architecture and

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. A key part of achieving that mission is training models that deeply understand and reflect human preferences — the Human Data team is at the heart of that effort. The Human Data engineering team creates the systems that enable scalable, high-quality human feedback. These systems are essential to how OpenAI trains and improves its most advanced models. Engineers on this team collaborate closely with world-class researchers to bring alignment techniques to life — from experimental ideas to production-ready feedback loops. About the Role We’re looking for software engineers to join the Human Data team and build the platforms, prototypes, tools, and infrastructure that power how our AI models are trained, aligned, and evaluated. You’ll partner with researchers and cross-functional teams to bring alignment ideas to life, influence future model training, and shape how models interact with the real world. We’re looking for people who are excited by technical ownership, enjoy working across the stack, and are eager to solve ambiguous problems in a high-impact, fast-paced environment. 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: Build and maintain robust full-stack systems for feedback collection, data labeling, and evaluation pipelines, while maintaining high levels of security. Translate experimental alignment research into scalable production infrastructure, including inference and model training stacks. Design and iterate on user-facing tools and backend services to support high-quality data workflows Partner with researchers, engineers, and program leads to shape feedback loops and model interaction paradigms Drive infrastructure improvements that enable faster iteration and scaling across OpenAI’s frontier models, from internal r

About the Team Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security team protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products. We are technical in what we build but operational in how we execute, and we support every product and research effort at OpenAI. Our tenets include prioritizing for impact, enabling researchers and developers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and fostering a strong, collaborative security culture. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a Security Software Engineer to join the Infrastructure Security (InfraSec) team. InfraSec safeguards the core of OpenAI’s research and production environments—GPU supercomputing clusters, multi-cloud infrastructure, datacenters, networking, storage, and the critical services that power our frontier AI models. Our charter spans everything from bare-metal hardware and firmware to Kubernetes clusters, service meshes, and the data pathways that carry highly sensitive model weights and user data. As a Security Software Engineer, you will design and build critical foundational services, such as authentication systems, egress/ingress proxies, access brokers, and key management platforms, that demand high standards of reliability, scalability, and software craftsmanship. These systems form the security backbone of OpenAI’s supercomputing environment and must remain robust under intense scale and adversarial pressure. In this role, you will: Architect and implement production-grade security services (e.g., auth services, access brokers, secure proxies, key-management infrastructure) that provide strong guarantees across hardware, operating systems, Kubernetes, networks, and CI/CD. Partner with infrastructure and research engineers to embed security into high-performance compute clusters, enabling rapid model training and deployment without compromising protection. Develop automation and detection tooling to continuously identif

About the Team We’re hiring software engineers to make the Workload team more productive. The Workload team maintains the core components of OpenAI’s training and inference frameworks and helps execute frontier experiments. About the Role We’re looking for someone who cares about the developer experience of working in and around OpenAI’s core training and inference frameworks. In this role you will: Be responsible for optimizing the development workflows of the engineers around you Work within various Workload teams to address their specific needs, but collaborate with the centralized teams that own various aspects of development experience Optimize iteration speed, both broadly, and in particular by optimizing specific teams’ CI Improve reliability, for instance, by driving testing strategy for particular components Work through the long tail of things that it takes to build libraries and systems that will delight researchers You might thrive in this role if: You are motivated by helping people. You believe a thing that separates great teams from good teams are the players willing to do whatever work it takes, without ego. You believe in the power of developer experience. Something magical happens when people can quickly and confidently iterate on a simple codebase, but this magic is fragile and must be fought for. When you see someone trip over something, no matter how small, your first instinct is asking yourself what it would take for that to not happen again. Your second instinct is clicking merge on the PR you’ve already written to make it so. You are pragmatic. You have the ability to see the world through a perfectionist’s eyes, but are not yourself a perfectionist. You know which problems to pick and when to switch to making progress on a different problem. You like going end-to-end on things. You love co-design — that feeling when you were only able to find the right solution because you both deeply understand the users that interact with a system and the

About the Team: The Database Systems team specializes in high-performance distributed databases. Our team built Rockset, the real-time search, analytics, and vector database that powers all vector search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at OpenAI. In addition to retrieval, as an online database, Rockset powers core functionality across all of OpenAI's product lines and many critical internal use cases. About the Role : We are looking for engineers passionate about distributed systems, close-to-the-metal performance optimization (our core engine is written in C++), and building scalable database infrastructure from the ground up. As an engineer on the Database Systems team, you'll contribute to the core database engine, driving improvements across ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. You'll partner with teams across OpenAI to unlock new product capabilities and help scale online database reliability and throughput as usage grows by orders of magnitude. In this role you will: Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks to scale infrastructure to the next order of magnitude Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams to deliver scalable and reliable infrastructure Dig deep into complex production issues across the stack Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and best practices for system reliability You might thrive in this role if you: Have significant experience building, scaling, and optimizing distributed systems at scale Are curious about database internals, storage engines, or low-latency query systems Enjoy debugging challenging performance issues in complex, high-throughput systems Have experience operating production clusters at scale (e.g., Kubernetes or other orchestration systems) Think rigorously about scalability, correctness, and reliability Thrive in fast-paced environments with high

About the Team The Cooperative AI team is scaling OpenAI with OpenAI. We are building a model powered knowledge system that evolves and learns as our products, systems and customers evolve. We leverage our state of the art models, technologies, and products (some external, some still in the lab) to assist or completely automate robust operations supporting both internal and external customers. We support OpenAI customers and internal partners globally, powering systems from customer support to integrity to product insights. We are a self-contained multi-disciplinary team, who enjoy a lightning fast feedback loop with customers at scale, some of whom sit just a few pods away. We iterate fast, and engineer for reliable long-term impact. We're constantly looking for the similarities and patterns in different types of work, and focus on building simple primitives, to apply world class knowledge to many domains. The work of this team exemplifies use of OpenAI technologies. We build systems so everyone can see the leverage that is possible with well designed AI-based implementations. We do this by working through internal use cases focused on Customers (specifically knowledge systems, automation systems, and automated agent systems) to prove impact, then we scale. About the Role We’re looking for a Backend Software Engineer to help architect and scale the infrastructure that powers our knowledge systems. This is a deeply technical and highly cross-functional role where you’ll build robust systems and backend services that serve as the foundation for how knowledge is created, accessed, and applied across OpenAI. In this role, you will: Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs to support intelligent automation and knowledge systems Integrate and structure data across internal platforms, transforming it into formats optimized for use by downstream systems and AI workflows. Collaborate closely with product, research, and engineering teams to integrate OpenAI mode

About the Team At OpenAI, we’re building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence. We deploy our models through ChatGPT, our APIs, and other cutting-edge products. Behind the scenes, making these systems fast, reliable, and cost-efficient requires world-class infrastructure. The Caching Infrastructure team is responsible for building a caching layer that powers many critical use cases at OpenAI. We aim to provide a high-availability, multi-tenant cache platform that scales automatically with workload, minimizes tail latency, and supports a diverse range of use cases. We’re looking for an experienced engineer to help design and scale this critical infrastructure. The ideal candidate has deep experience in distributed caching systems (e.g., Redis, Memcached), networking fundamentals, and Kubernetes-based service orchestration. In This Role, You Will: Design, build, and operate OpenAI’s multi-tenant caching platform used across inference, identity, quota, and product experiences. Define the long-term vision and roadmap for caching as a core infra capability, balancing performance, durability, and cost. Collaborate with other infra teams (e.g., networking, observability, databases) and product teams to ensure our caching platform meets their needs. You Might Thrive In This Role If You: Have 5+ years of experience building and scaling distributed systems, with a strong focus on caching, load balancing, or storage systems. Have deep expertise with Redis, Memcached, or similar solutions, including clustering, durability configurations, client-side connection patterns, and performance tuning. Have production experience with Kubernetes, service meshes (e.g., Envoy), and autoscaling systems. Think rigorously about latency, reliability, throughput, and cost in designing platform capabilities. Thrive in a fast-paced environment and enjoy balancing pragmatic engineering with long-term technical excellence. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company d

About the team Online Data builds and operates Habitat, the single product surface of Online Data and the system of record for OpenAI’s online user data. As OpenAI’s scale and product requirements evolve, Habitat is becoming a full-stack, one-size-fits-most database platform with end-to-end ownership of: Provisioning and developer experience APIs and guardrails Scaling, performance, and reliability Data movement, caching, routing, and placement Privacy enforcement and access control Change Data Capture (CDC) as a first-class primitive The foundation for future storage backends You’ll work on the core online database platform behind OpenAI’s products, building and operating Habitat services that handle high-QPS, latency-sensitive workloads across regions. You’ll partner closely with internal platform and product teams to ship safe, reliable systems, then push them to be faster and more cost-efficient through better caching, routing, observability, and operational tooling. This is a critical role for engineers who like owning hard distributed-systems problems end to end and sweating the details from p99 latency to production operations at massive scale. In this role, you will Design and build core abstractions spanning storage, caching, routing, CDC, and privacy enforcement Own a major surface area end to end, from product and API design to operational excellence Improve latency, correctness, and cost efficiency for real production workloads at massive scale Build strong instrumentation, debugging workflows, and developer-first tooling Collaborate closely with internal product and infrastructure teams to understand requirements and ship pragmatic solutions Participate in an on-call rotation and raise the bar on reliability while aggressively improving performance and usability You might thrive in this role if you have A strong track record building and operating high-scale backend or data-intensive distributed systems in production Excellent systems judgment and the a

About the Team The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. You’ll join the team responsible for running the core infrastructure that supports products like ChatGPT and the API. The systems we support include our kubernetes clusters, infrastructure deployment, our networking stack, cloud abstractions, and more. 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 The cloud infrastructure team builds and maintains infrastructure abstractions allowing OpenAI to ship products quickly and scalably. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. In this role, you will: Design and build the development and production platforms that power our products, enabling reliability and security at scale Ensure our infrastructure can scale to the next order of magnitude Help create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while enabling radical candor and the challenging of group think Like all other teams, we are responsible for the reliability of the systems we build. This includes an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 5+ years building core infrastructure Have experience operating orchestration systems such as Kubernetes at scale Have experience building abstractions over cloud platforms Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable, secure systems Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. 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 depl

About the Team The Workload team is responsible for designing and running OpenAI’s LLM training and inference infrastructure that powers frontier models at massive scale. Our systems unify how researchers train and serve models, abstracting away the complexity of performance, parallelism, and execution across vast GPU/accelerator fleets. By providing this foundation, the Workload team ensures that researchers can focus on advancing model capabilities while we handle the scale, efficiency, and reliability required to bring those models to life. About the Role We are looking for an engineer to design and implement the dataset infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s next-generation training stack. You will be responsible for building standardized dataset interfaces, scaling pipelines across thousands of GPUs, and proactively testing performance bottlenecks. In this role, you will collaborate closely with the multimodal researchers, and other infra groups to ensure datasets are unified, efficient, and easy to consume. In this role, you will: Design and maintain standardized dataset APIs, including for multimodal (MM) data that cannot fit in memory. Build proactive testing and scale validation pipelines for dataset loading at GPU scale. Collaborate with teammates to integrate datasets seamlessly into training and inference pipelines, ensuring smooth adoption and a great user experience. Document and maintain dataset interfaces so they are discoverable, consistent, and easy for other teams to adopt. Establish safeguards and validation systems to ensure datasets remain reproducible and unchanged once standardized. Debug and resolve performance bottlenecks in distributed dataset loading (e.g., straggler systems slowing global training). Provide visualization and inspection tools to surface errors, bugs, or bottlenecks in datasets. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong engineering fundamentals with experience in distributed systems, data pipelines, or infrastructure.

About the Team OpenAI’s Inference team powers the deployment of our most advanced models - including our GPT models, 4o Image Generation, and Whisper - across a variety of platforms. Our work ensures these models are available, performant, and scalable in production, and we partner closely with Research to bring the next generation of models into the world. We're a small, fast-moving team of engineers focused on delivering a world-class developer experience while pushing the boundaries of what AI can do. We’re expanding into multimodal inference, building the infrastructure needed to serve models that handle image, audio, and other non-text modalities. These workloads are inherently more heterogeneous and experimental, involving diverse model sizes and interactions, more complex input/output formats, and tighter coordination with product and research. About the Role We’re looking for a software engineer to help us serve OpenAI’s multimodal models at scale. You’ll be part of a small team responsible for building reliable, high-performance infrastructure for serving real-time audio, image, and other MM workloads in production. This work is inherently cross-functional: you’ll collaborate directly with researchers training these models and with product teams defining new modalities of interaction. You'll build and optimize the systems that let users generate speech, understand images, and interact with models in ways far beyond text. In this role, you will: Design and implement inference infrastructure for large-scale multimodal models. Optimize systems for high-throughput, low-latency delivery of image and audio inputs and outputs. Enable experimental research workflows to transition into reliable production services. Collaborate closely with researchers, infra teams, and product engineers to deploy state-of-the-art capabilities. Contribute to system-level improvements including GPU utilization, tensor parallelism, and hardware abstraction layers. You might thrive in t

About the Team The Systems Integration team is responsible for building the infrastructure, tooling, and validation systems that ensure our device software is reliable, testable, and ready to ship. We design and maintain automated test frameworks, hardware-in-the-loop labs, and release pipelines that keep quality signals trustworthy and enable rapid, safe product launches. Our work spans developer tools, automation, systems integration, and cross-team collaboration to ensure every release meets the highest standards. About the Role As a Software Engineer, Quality and Developer Tools , you will build and own the systems that validate our device software—from test frameworks and regression infrastructure to hardware-in-the-loop labs and release gates. You’ll design the tooling and automation that keep quality signals trustworthy, integrate them into CI/CD, and make it easy for engineers and QA vendor technicians to execute reliable, repeatable workflows. We’re looking for engineers with deep experience in software quality, automation, developer tooling, and hardware-software integration who thrive on building scalable, reliable systems for validation and release readiness. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Test infrastructure & frameworks: Design, implement, and maintain a unified test framework for device software across unit, integration, system, and end-to-end testing, with reproducible runs and integrations with GitHub, Linear, and Slack. CI/CD integration & releases: Integrate test suites with Buildkite, enforce promotion criteria for staging and production, auto-file regressions, and publish traceable artifacts and release notes. Hardware-in-the-loop lab design & orchestration: Plan and bring up racks, power and networking systems, and orchestration for device testing; support automated flashing, provisioning