
Software Engineer, Delivery / CD at OpenAI (San Francisco, CA)
OpenAI· San Francisco, CA· $210k–$490k·
Role details
Equity
OpenAI at a glance
Builds frontier AI models and ships them as consumer, developer, and enterprise products — ChatGPT, the API platform, and Codex.
Builds frontier AI models and ships them as consumer, developer, and enterprise products (ChatGPT, the OpenAI API platform, Codex, and an agent layer).
~$180B raised · latest: $122B round at an $852B valuation (2026) · backed by Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, SoftBank
Summary
Design and build continuous deployment infrastructure for OpenAI's infrastructure and product code, ensuring safe and rapid production releases. The role focuses on developing progressive delivery systems, automating operational workflows, and improving engineer velocity through AI-assisted deployment tools.
Job description
About the Role
The Engineering Acceleration Delivery / Continuous Deployment team builds and operates the systems that safely ship OpenAI’s infrastructure and product code to production. We own the deployment platform, release pipelines, and rollout safety mechanisms that allow engineers across OpenAI to deploy changes rapidly while minimizing operational risk. Our mission is to make production deployments fast, safe, and increasingly autonomous. This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, distributed systems reliability, and large-scale infrastructure orchestration.
In This Role, You Will
- Design and build continuous deployment infrastructure that safely rolls out changes across dozens of Kubernetes clusters and global regions.
- Develop systems for progressive delivery, including canary releases, staged rollouts, and automated rollback.
- Improve engineering velocity by reducing friction in the release pipeline and automating manual operational workflows.
- Work with product and infrastructure teams to ensure their services are deployable, observable, and resilient at scale.
- Implement and evolve deployment methodologies such as GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, and progressive delivery patterns.
- Build systems that automatically evaluate deployment health using metrics, logs, traces, and alerts to detect regressions and trigger safe rollbacks.
- Build systems that support agent-assisted or autonomous deployment workflows using modern AI tooling.
Technologies commonly used in this environment include:
- Kubernetes for large-scale container orchestration and runtime infrastructure
- Python and FastAPI for internal services
- Terraform for infrastructure as code
- GitOps-based deployment workflows (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux, or similar systems)
- Buildkite for CI orchestration
You may be a strong fit if you:
- Have worked with Kubernetes-based deployment systems at scale
- Have experience building or operating continuous deployment platforms
- Are familiar with GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD or Flux
- Are excited about building AI-assisted systems and agents that intelligently shepherd software changes from commit to safe production rollout.
- Care deeply about safe production rollouts and minimizing blast radius
- Enjoy building internal platforms that improve developer productivity across the organization
Compensation
$230K – $490K + Offers Equity
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. 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. 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. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy 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.
Why work at OpenAI
- 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.