--- title: 'Software Engineer, Agent Infrastructure at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-agent-infrastructure-openai-san-francisco-w6j5chhedh5g' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Software Engineer, Agent Infrastructure at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $230k–$385k - **Employment:** full-time - **Posted:** 2025-05-30 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/c1316397-25bb-4add-9e9d-0e3ea8ba929a/application **Skills:** FastAPI, gRPC, Terraform, Container Orchestration, Kata, Firecracker, gVisor, Sysbox, Cloud Platforms, Virtualization, Kubernetes > Build and scale systems to train and deploy highly capable AI agents, including container orchestration platforms, FastAPI/gRPC APIs, and infrastructure-as-code solutions. Collaborate with research teams to optimize performance in massive distributed environments. ## Job description ## About the Team The Agent Infrastructure team at OpenAI is responsible for building systems that enable training and deployment of highly useful AI agents, both internally and for the world. We work hand-in-hand with researchers to design and scale the environment in which agentic models are trained – providing a workspace for AI models to execute code, debug issues, and develop software just as human SWEs do. Our training environment for agentic models operates at an extremely high scale and has the flexibility to emulate any environment in which an agent might work. At the same time, our team builds and maintains OpenAI’s core platform for the deployment and execution of agents in production. Our systems power products such as Codex, Operator, tool use in ChatGPT, and future agentic products. Some of the most challenging technical problems in scaling the capabilities and utility of agents and agentic models lie in the infrastructure layer – and our team is focused on building the research and production systems that enable OpenAI to train the most capable models in the world, and maximize the utility of our agentic products for users around the world. ## About the Role As a Software Engineer on the Agent Infrastructure team, you will have the opportunity to work closely with both research and product at OpenAI - building and scaling systems to train highly capable agentic models, and building the platform and integrations to launch new agents to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Your work will consist of both building new capabilities - standing up the infrastructure and integrations needed to train more complex agentic models - and rapidly scaling these new capabilities to some of the largest compute clusters in the world. At the same time, you’ll be instrumental to the launch of agentic products at OpenAI - building, maintaining, and scaling the production platform on which all agents run. We’re looking for people with deep experience building AI infrastructure and who are used to working closely with researchers to build high-performance systems at massive scale for novel use cases. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, New York City, NY or London, UK. 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: - Push massive compute clusters to their limits. You will be a core contributor to a novel container orchestration platform built in-house by our team to scale far beyond what’s possible with systems like Kubernetes. - Develop and maintain FastAPI and gRPC APIs that serve as the interface for our agentic infrastructure used both in training and production. - Use Terraform to stand up and evolve complex infrastructure for both research and production. - Collaborate with research teams to stand up and optimize systems for novel AI training runs and experimental applications. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have deep experience working on large-scale machine learning infrastructure. You know how to reason about training at scale, identifying bottlenecks and engineering solutions to optimize system performance in training environments. - Know how to build new things from 0-1 quickly, and then scale them 1,000,000x. - Have a keen eye for performance and optimization. You know how to squeeze the most performance out of complex, globally-distributed systems. - Know your way around cloud platforms and work with infrastructure-as-code tech like Terraform. - Are driven by solving complex, ambiguous problems at the intersection of infrastructure scalability, virtualization efficiency, and agentic capabilities. - Have deep technical expertise in virtualization and containerization technologies (e.g. Kata, Firecracker, gVisor, Sysbox) and are passionate about optimizing runtime performance. ## 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 race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see [OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology. ## About OpenAI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. - **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO. - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: 2015 - **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment - **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models) - **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity. ## Products & Services - **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows. - **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.). - **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions. - **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system. - **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026). ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials. - **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. - **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models. ## Competitive Advantages - **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI. - **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent. - **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference. - **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products. ## Strategic Focus - **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance). - **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses. - **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026). - **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus. - **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget. - **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI. - **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications. ## Sources 1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/) 2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/) 3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search) 4. 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