Team Lead in San Francisco

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 OpenAI’s Platform team powers how millions of developers and enterprises build with our models. We provide APIs and agentic solutions used by global startups and fortune 500s. We work closely with product, engineering, design, and go-to-market to build a world-class platform that pushes the frontier of AI capabilities. About the Role As a Data Scientist on the Platform team, you will drive a data-driven culture for OpenAI’s API and B2B solutions. You’ll define the metrics that matter for developer success and enterprise value, measure the impact of new models and features, and partner with PMs and engineers to improve model quality, reliability, latency, and cost. Your work will shape how thousands of products adopt agentic AI. 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 Embed with the Platform product team as a trusted partner, uncovering ways to improve developer experience, reliability, and usage growth Define north-star metrics across the developer funnel (activation, retention, growth), as well as latency/cost guardrails for new features and models Design and interpret A/B tests and controlled rollouts (e.g., new model versions, pricing/limits, new API features, new B2B products) Build source-of-truth dashboards and self-serve data tools for product, engineering, and go-to-market teams Translate product learnings into actionable feedback for Research (e.g., failure modes, eval gaps, model response quality) You might thrive in this role if you have 5+ years in a quantitative role in ambiguous, high-growth environments (platforms, APIs, or B2B products a plus) Depth in SQL and Python, with a track record proposing, designing, and running rigorous experiments Experience defining and operationalizing metrics from scratch (including reliability/latency/cost and safety) Strong cross-functional communication with PMs, enginee

About the Team: GTM Innovation is a product engineering team with a charter to automate 100% of digital knowledge work in OpenAI's GTM, so sellers spend more time directly with customers. AGI-level reasoning doesn’t mean organization-level transformation “just works” out of the box; orgs must be redesigned around abundant intelligence and persistent virtual coworkers. Our team builds and scales a fleet of virtual coworkers that operate as full-time members of the account team, and redefines how our human-first revenue organization interacts with their agentic teammates. About the Role We’re looking for Full Stack software engineers with a product mindset to join the GTM Innovation team. As a product engineer on this team, you’ll help OpenAI meet the world at scale. You’ll partner closely with go-to-market teams to understand their workflows, identify leverage points, and ship novel solutions using OpenAI’s API platform. You’ll move quickly from prototype to production, and your work will directly shape how customers experience our technology in the field. This role is ideal for engineers who want to be close to users, own end-to-end outcomes, and help define entirely new categories of enterprise software. In this role, you will: Build high-impact applications and tools that accelerate OpenAI’s go-to-market efforts Work across the full product lifecycle for GTM: prototype, iterate, ship, and maintain Embed with Sales, Technical Success, and Revenue Operations to identify user needs and build for them Apply OpenAI’s models in novel ways to solve real-world customer and internal workflow problems Translate learnings into feedback for Applied and Research teams to inform product development You’ll thrive in this role if you: Have 4+ years of experience as a software/ML/product engineer working on user-facing systems Former founder, or early engineer at a startup who built a product from scratch is a plus Are fluent in Python or JavaScript and comfortable building full-s

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 OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe that achieving our goal requires real world deployment and iteratively updating based on what we learn. The Protection Scientist Engineer, Integrity team supports this by identifying and investigating misuses of our products – especially new types of abuse. This enables our partner teams to develop data-backed product policies and build scaled safety mitigations. Precisely understanding abuse allows us to safely enable users to build useful things with our products. About the Role Protection Science Engineering is an interdisciplinary role mixing data science, machine learning, investigation, and policy/protocol development. As a Protection Scientist Engineer within Integrity and Investigations, you will be responsible for designing and building systems to proactively identify and enforce on abuse on OpenAI’s products. This includes ensuring we have robust abuse monitoring in place for new products, sustaining monitoring for existing products, and prototyping and incubating systems of defense against our highest risk harms. You will also respond to and investigate critical escalations, especially those that are not caught by our existing safety systems. This will require expert understanding of our products and data, and involves working cross-functionally with product, policy, and engineering teams. This role can be based in either our San Francisco, or NY office and includes participation in an on-call rotation that will involve resolving urgent escalations outside of normal work hours. Some investigations may involve sensitive content, including sexual, violent, or otherwise-disturbing material. In this role, you will: Scope and implement abuse monitoring requirements for new product launches. Improve processes to sustain monitoring operations for existing products, including developing approaches to automate monitoring subtasks. Prototyp

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 Support Automation team at OpenAI scales the organization by applying cutting-edge AI models to real-world challenges, automating and enhancing work across the organization. From customer operations to engineering, we develop an ecosystem of automation products that empower our colleagues and drive impact. We're passionate about crafting products that serve those around us, blending rapid prototyping with a focus on long-term quality and reliability. By creating reusable solutions, we create patterns that can be applied across diverse domains within OpenAI. TLDR: this team leverages OpenAI technology to improve OpenAI, and you’ll have the opportunity to leverage the full extent of our tech (both public and pre-released) to accomplish this mission. About the Role We’re looking for a Backend Software Engineer with experience working in ML/LLM-heavy domains to help to design and build an evals infrastructure that measures the quality of OpenAI’s support automation. 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. The role will especially focus on working closely with Data Science and Research partners to design and build evals at scale. In this role, you will: Design eval pipelines that are reliable, reproducible, and extendable Build the infrastructure for continuous eval monitoring frameworks (regression/drift monitoring, building robust golden datasets) along with feedback loops that ultimately strengthen support automation 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 data, research, and engineering teams to integrate OpenAI models into high-leverage workflows

About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and advancing toward AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments. Working across the full model and systems 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 physical constraints of real-world systems to improve people’s lives. About the Role We're looking for an experienced Electrical Engineer to help develop the next generation of robotic systems at OpenAI. This role spans the full lifecycle of hardware development, from early concept exploration and prototyping through circuit design, component selection, PCB layout, bring-up, integration, and deployment. Engineers in this role are expected to independently drive significant hardware efforts from initial concept through deployment. You will translate ambiguous goals into concrete engineering plans, make key technical decisions, coordinate closely with cross-functional partners, and own execution through the iterations required to deliver a successful system. Many of the systems we build are still being defined. You will work closely with mechanical, firmware, software, controls, and research teams to evaluate new ideas, develop novel hardware, and integrate it into robotic platforms. Success in this role requires strong engineering judgment, comfort operating in ambiguous spaces, and the ability to balance rapid experimentation with the discipline required to build reliable and scalable systems. The ideal candidate enjoys building things from first principles and is equally comfortable evaluating a new technology, debugging a prototype on the bench, reviewing PCB layout details, and driving system integration efforts. You should be able to move quickly when appropriate, but also know when investing in robustness, simplicity, or infrastructure will create leverage for future development. This role is

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 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 hiring a Sim Infrastructure Engineer to turn simulation systems into reliable, automated, production-quality pipelines that power model training, evaluation, and hardware-in-the-loop validation. This role owns the automation, orchestration, and tool integration that apply simulation to concrete robotics tasks: building CI/CD for SIL/HIL, presubmit checks, automatic model evaluation, metric computation and reporting, and the runtime infrastructure to run simulations at scale. You will collaborate closely with Sim Realism, Sim Environments, Research, and Ops to make simulation an integrated, reproducible, and measurable part of our ML and robotics workflows. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person 4 days a week. In this role, you will: Build and maintain presubmit checks, continuous integration and deployment pipelines for simulation code, environments, and tasks so simulation artifacts are testable, versioned, and reproducible. Implement end-to-end automation to run model evaluation in sim (SIL) and orchestrate HIL runs; compute realism and task metrics, generate dashboards and alerts, and ensure evaluation is repeatable and auditable. Create robust APIs and connectors so research, training, and data-collection systems can schedule, seed, and evaluate batches of simulations; support RL rollouts, imitation-data collection, and presubmit model checks. Build scheduling, batching and orchestration for running very large numbers of concurrent rollouts (target tens of thousands of rollouts / large RL workloads), sol

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 Data Understanding team is responsible for creating the high quality datasets and their quantized representation for OpenAI. This includes synthesizing multimodal data, building VQ representations, and processing, filtering, deduplication, quality control, and tokenization so it can be used effectively in big model training runs. About The Role We’re looking to advance how OpenAI prepares, curates, synthesizes and understands multimodal data at scale. You’ll work on research and production problems like synthesizing multimodal content (images, audio, and video) and their supervisions, improving noisy data pipelines, building better quality filters, using models to automate data prep, and measuring whether changes in the dataset improve model performance. We Expect You To Have a strong track record of new or improved ML ideas, through publications, projects, or applied research. Own and drive a research agenda, from choosing the right multimodal data problems to carrying long-running work through to impact. Be excited by OpenAI’s empirical, collaborative approach to research. Nice To Have Experience with multimodal learning, audio, vision, video, synthetic data, or data-centric ML. Thoughtfulness about AI’s impact, including privacy, provenance, and data quality. Experience building high-performance deep learning or large-scale data processing systems. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of

About the Team The Developer Experience team at OpenAI has a singular focus: empowering developers globally. Our mission is to provide every developer and startup on the planet with the most delightful and seamless experience to integrate AI into their applications and products. We ensure developers have the tools, resources, and support they need to unlock AI’s full potential. We create inspiring demos, developer tools, sample applications, and technical content that show developers how to build with Codex and frontier models like GPT-5.6, GPT-Live, and GPT-Image-2 to create powerful agents and AI-native applications. We collaborate closely with product, engineering, research, and GTM teams to ensure the developer journey, from onboarding with Codex to first API call to production deployment, is seamless, effective, and delightful. About the Role As a Developer Experience Engineer, you will create compelling technical content, developer tools, and sample applications designed to inspire developers and enable them to succeed with Codex and OpenAI’s APIs and products for developers. You will engage with developers and technical founders, demonstrating best practices and building innovative applications powered by frontier models, multimodal capabilities, and tools like Codex. We’re looking for people who combine strong technical skills, creativity, and a passion for engaging with and empowering developers. In this role, you will: Develop demos and sample applications that showcase best practices for building with Codex, frontier models, multimodal capabilities, and agents. Create high-quality technical content—including tutorials, blog posts, videos, and code samples—to educate and inspire the developer community about our models, APIs, and Codex. Actively engage with and foster a vibrant local and global developer ecosystem around OpenAI’s platform and products. Represent OpenAI at developer events and online, serving as a knowledgeable and approachable advocate for