OpenAI
Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure
Part remote, part office, you need to live within commuting distance of a named location.
Hybrid · San Francisco
Employer listed it 5 months ago · Added 4 days ago
Been open since 5 months ago. Long-running listings are sometimes left up after the role is filled.
Salary
$347,000–$445,000
Location
Hybrid · San Francisco
Timezone
Not stated
Contract
Full-time
Experience
Mid
Category
Software
Published by the employer
Remote flexibility
Hybrid
This role is only partly remote, the employer expects time in the office around San Francisco, Hybrid, so you need to live within commuting distance.
What the employer says
- Source listing states candidate location: "San Francisco, Hybrid"
- Listing mentions "Hybrid"
What Nomaders makes of it
- Not suitable if you plan to move between countries
The quotes above are the employer's own words; the reading is ours. Always check the original listing and employment terms before working from another country.
About the role
About the Team
ChatGPT is a rapidly evolving system: new capabilities ship continuously, product surfaces change quickly, and usage patterns shift week-to-week. Supporting that pace requires infrastructure that can handle real production constraints—high concurrency, unpredictable traffic patterns, complex dependency graphs, and frequent change.
The ChatGPT Infrastructure team builds and operates the platforms that enable fast iteration without compromising performance or reliability. We design shared systems, data paths, rollout mechanisms, and reliability guardrails that teams rely on to ship changes to ChatGPT at scale.
We focus on high-leverage infrastructure: primitives and “golden paths” that incorporate operational lessons as defaults, so engineers don’t need to rediscover failure modes, latency pitfalls, or integration issues each time they build something new.
About the Role
We’re hiring Senior and Staff Engineers to design and build infrastructure systems that underlie ChatGPT and multiply the effectiveness of teams building user experiences.
This is not a support-only role. It’s a platform-building role: you’ll define interfaces, develop core abstractions, and create tooling to make safe, fast iteration the norm. Your work will reduce friction, prevent regressions, improve performance, and ensure systems scale gracefully as the product grows.
Where You Can Have Impact
You might work on one or more of the following areas (without being restricted to any single area):
Platform foundations & frameworks: Core libraries, service frameworks, and shared components that standardize system building, integration, and evolution.
Scalability & performance primitives: Patterns and infrastructure that reduce tail latency, improve throughput, and keep costs predictable as demand increases.
Reliability guardrails: Mechanisms that prevent outages by design—rate limiting, load shedding, dependency isolation, backpressure, safe fallbacks, and robust regression controls.
Developer productivity via golden paths: Paved roads for common workflows (data access patterns, service integration, request lifecycle) that are fast, safe, and easy to use.
Observability & debugging systems: Instrumentation, metrics models, and investigative tooling that turn vague symptoms (“it’s slow”) into precise, actionable diagnoses.
Safe change management: Deployment and rollout systems that support rapid iteration with confidence—progressive delivery, automated verification, and fast rollback strategies.
Interface and contract design across boundaries: Clean APIs and stable contracts that reduce coupling and enable independent evolution across a complex ecosystem.
What You’ll Do
Build and evolve infrastructure platforms used by many engineers and services.
Translate real-world constraints into clean abstractions: simple APIs, enforceable contracts, safe defaults.
Drive improvements in reliability and performance through principled design, measurement, and iterative hardening.
Partner with engineering and product teams to identify systemic pain points and develop reusable solutions.
Own outcomes end-to-end: design → implementation → rollout → operational maturity.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications
Requirements
- ·Minimum Qualifications
- ·Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production (high throughput, concurrency, and failure handling).
- ·Strong fundamentals in systems design, including caching, consistency, queueing/backpressure, and resilient dependency management.
- ·Ability to reason about performance (latency distributions, tail behavior, bottlenecks) and translate analysis into concrete engineering work.
- ·Track record of building platforms or shared infrastructure that improves velocity and correctness for other teams.
Benefits
No benefits package published with this listing. Ask about it at first interview.
How to apply
- 1Check the flexibility label above, hybrid, matches where you plan to live and work.
- 2Tailor your CV to the role at OpenAI, mentioning your remote working experience.
- 3Apply directly on the employer's careers page using the button below. Nomaders never handles your application.
Found 5d ago. Last checked today. Always confirm the details on the original posting, salary and location can change after publication.
Listing sourced from Company boards.
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$347,000–$445,000 · You'll be taken to the employer's careers page.