---
title: 'Software Engineer, Compute Infrastructure at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-compute-infrastructure-openai-san-francisco-ssa9dzfyebrx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-24'
---

# Software Engineer, Compute Infrastructure at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $230k–$405k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-24
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/ca300a6d-a2a7-4580-aad7-323fbdfee7b1/application

**Skills:** Distributed systems, preferred_education [], preferred_certifications [], preferred_hard_skills

> Build and optimize the platform for large-scale compute systems supporting frontier AI research. Responsibilities include designing distributed infrastructure, high-performance networking, and hardware-aware automation to ensure reliability and usability for scientists and product teams.

## Job description

About the Team:

Compute Infrastructure builds the platform that turns enormous amounts of compute into a reliable engine for frontier AI. We design, provision, schedule, operate, and optimize the systems that connect accelerators, CPUs, networks, storage, data centers, orchestration software, agent infrastructure, developer tools, and observability into one coherent experience for researchers and product teams.

Our work spans the entire stack: capacity planning and cluster lifecycle, bare-metal automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes and scheduling, deep system optimization, high-performance networking, storage, fleet health, reliability, workload profiling, benchmarking, and the developer experience that lets teams use enormous compute systems with confidence. At this scale, small improvements to communication, scheduling, hardware efficiency, or debugging workflows can compound into meaningful research velocity. We are hiring across Compute Infrastructure rather than for a single narrow team, and we use this opening to match strong engineers to the problems where they can have the most leverage.

## About the Role

We are looking for engineers who want to build the compute platform behind OpenAI's research and products. You may not be the strongest in low-level systems, high-performance computing, distributed infrastructure, reliability, CaaS, agent infrastructure, developer platforms, tooling, or the user experience around infrastructure. What matters is that you can reason carefully about complex systems, write durable software, and raise the quality and velocity of the people around you.

Depending on your background and interests, you might work close to hardware, close to users, on CaaS and agent infrastructure, or on the control planes and data planes in between. You could help bring new supercomputing capacity online, optimize training workloads from profiler traces and benchmarks, improve NCCL and collective communication behavior, reason about GPUs, NICs, topology, firmware, thermals, and failure modes, or design abstractions that make heterogeneous clusters feel like one coherent platform.

We do not expect every candidate to have worked at every layer. Some engineers will go deep on systems performance, kernel or runtime behavior, large-scale networking protocols, RDMA, NCCL, GPU hardware behavior, benchmarking, scheduling, or hardware reliability; others will make the platform more usable through APIs, tools, workflows, and developer experience. The common thread is strong engineering judgment and excitement about making enormous compute systems faster, more reliable, and easier to use.

This is a general opening for Compute Infrastructure. We will consider candidates for teams across Compute Infrastructure and match you based on your strengths, the problems that motivate you, and where the infrastructure needs are highest.

Where you might work

- Compute Foundations: Build the low-level platform primitives that make heterogeneous hardware, providers, and data centers repeatable, automatable, and operable at scale.
- Fleet / Orchestration: Turn raw capacity into reliable, efficient clusters and scheduling systems that researchers and product teams can use with minimal friction and great experience.
- Core Network Engineering: Build and operate the high-performance networking fabrics, protocols, and observability needed for the largest training and serving workloads.
- Hardware Health and Observability: Detect, diagnose, remediate, and prevent hardware and fleet-health issues so usable compute stays high across providers and accelerator generations.
- Storage: Build scalable, performant, durable storage abstractions that keep data movement and storage access from becoming a bottleneck to research or products.
- Agent Infrastructure: Build sandboxed execution infrastructure for agentic workloads across research and production, with strong isolation, reliability, and scale.

In this role, you will:

- Build and deeply optimize reliable system software for large-scale compute systems that run some of the world's most demanding AI workloads
- Design and operate infrastructure across accelerators, CPUs, NICs, switches, networking protocols, storage, data centers, cluster orchestration, scheduling, and fleet health
- Profile, benchmark, and optimize training workloads across compute, memory, storage, networking, NCCL and collective communication, and cluster scheduling bottlenecks
- Create hardware-aware automation that makes provisioning, firmware and driver upgrades, incident response, and day-to-day operations faster and less error-prone
- Build CaaS, agent infrastructure, profiling, observability, benchmarking, and platform tools that help researchers, product engineers, and operators launch, debug, and optimize workloads with less friction
- Turn operational lessons into better systems, stronger abstractions, and clearer ownership boundaries across teams
- Collaborate across research, engineering, security, networking, hardware, and data center teams to make compute capacity more capable and easier to use

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have built or operated distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, high-performance computing environments, large-scale networking systems, Kubernetes clusters, developer tools, or production systems with demanding reliability requirements
- Enjoy working across layers of the stack and are comfortable moving between software, hardware, networking, systems performance, reliability, and user needs
- Care about making complex infrastructure understandable, observable, and usable for the people depending on it
- Can diagnose hard problems under real operational pressure while still investing in long-term engineering quality
- Like building leverage for others, whether through APIs, automation, debugging tools, CaaS and agent infrastructure primitives, workflow improvements, or better platform abstractions
- Are motivated by scale, efficiency, reliability, and disciplined measurement through benchmarks, profiles, and production evidence
- Communicate clearly, take ownership, and work well with teams whose constraints and goals differ from your own

## Qualifications

- Strong software engineering skills and experience building, operating, or improving production infrastructure systems
- Experience in one or more relevant areas such as distributed systems, operating systems, networking protocols, RDMA, NCCL or collective communication, storage, Kubernetes, scheduling, observability, reliability engineering, high-performance computing, GPU infrastructure, CaaS, agent infrastructure, hardware-aware performance optimization, benchmarking, developer experience, or infrastructure tooling
- Ability to debug complex system behavior across software, hardware, networking, and workload layers, then turn findings into robust improvements
- Comfort with ambiguity, strong ownership, and a bias toward practical, durable solutions
- Interest in working on infrastructure that directly enables frontier AI research and product impact

## 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. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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