---
title: 'Software Engineer, Infranomics at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-infranomics-openai-san-francisco-sw7fe8ahcx2y'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-29'
---

# Software Engineer, Infranomics at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $385k–$445k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-29
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/b6e0d9c6-a5ad-4d27-ad67-fde760e277b6

## Job description

## About the Team

The Infranomics team builds the software and data foundations that help OpenAI understand, plan, and improve the economics of its infrastructure. The team works across engineering and finance to make infrastructure spend visible, allocate capacity effectively, and improve efficiency as our products grow. Our systems support the CPU, network, storage and GPU infrastructure behind products such as ChatGPT, the API, and Codex. We are expanding these foundations to connect resource usage, cost, forecasting, and planning so teams can make better decisions at scale.

## About the Role

We are looking for a Software Engineer to lead the design, implementation, and operation of systems for infrastructure cost and efficiency. You will build the platforms that explain where infrastructure spend goes, identify opportunities to improve utilization, and help teams plan the capacity they need. We ideally want direct experience building and operating software for infrastructure economics, such as usage metering, cost attribution, resource efficiency, budgeting, forecasting, or capacity planning. You should have owned systems that connect compute, storage, or network consumption to cost and help teams make measurable efficiency and investment decisions. You will set technical direction for a growing area while staying close to the code. Working with infrastructure engineers, product teams, finance, and leadership, you will turn ambiguous business and engineering problems into reliable software, shared data, and measurable improvements. This role offers substantial autonomy and the opportunity to shape how OpenAI manages its infrastructure investment. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. This is an on-site role.

In this role, you will:

- Define the technical direction and roadmap for infrastructure cost and efficiency systems, and lead projects from problem definition through implementation, adoption, and ongoing operation.
- Build billing, usage metering, and cost attribution systems that connect infrastructure spend to resources, workloads, services, and the teams that own them.
- Develop data pipelines and shared data models that combine cloud billing, resource inventory, and utilization signals into a dependable view of cost and capacity.
- Build tools for budgeting, forecasting, and capacity planning that help teams anticipate demand, allocate resources, and inform procurement decisions.
- Identify underutilized resources and other sources of waste, then partner with engineering teams to deliver and measure improvements while preserving performance and reliability.
- Create APIs, reporting tools, and automated controls that help teams understand their consumption, manage budgets, and make informed infrastructure tradeoffs.
- Provide technical leadership across teams, mentor engineers, and own the correctness, scalability, and production behavior of the systems you build.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have over 7 years of experience designing, building, and operating production software and distributed systems, with technical ownership across multiple teams or a significant infrastructure domain.
- Have built systems for infrastructure efficiency, cloud cost attribution, usage metering, budgeting, forecasting, or capacity management, and can connect that work to measurable outcomes.
- Remain a hands-on engineer who can move between architecture, implementation, debugging, and operational improvements.
- Understand how compute, storage, and networking consumption translate into cost, and can reason about the tradeoffs among utilization, performance, reliability, and growth.
- Care deeply about data correctness and can build trustworthy systems from complex billing and operational data.
- Work effectively across engineering, finance, product, and leadership, translating broad goals into a clear plan and driving adoption without relying on formal authority.
- Thrive with substantial autonomy, take ownership of loosely defined problems, and make pragmatic decisions as requirements evolve.
- Have experience building internal platforms that give engineering teams visibility into cloud spend, resource utilization, and ownership.
- Have experience developing batch or streaming data pipelines, financial data platforms, or large-scale analytics systems.
- Have experience with Kubernetes, public cloud infrastructure, or resource management systems across cloud and on-premises environments.
- Have experience automating resource allocation, cost allocation policies, budget tracking, or capacity forecasting.

## 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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