--- title: 'Software Engineer, Resilience Engineering at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-resilience-engineering-openai-san-francisco-yg96tyrqrsfp' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Software Engineer, Resilience Engineering at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $230k–$490k - **Employment:** full-time - **Posted:** 2025-10-17 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/1faee5e7-3b2f-4d8c-9a6f-ff0f2a4a42a7/application **Skills:** Cloud infrastructure, Programming languages, Containerization, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Terraform, CloudFormation, Observability tools, DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Microservices architecture, Service mesh technologies, Security best practices in cloud environments > Design and implement solutions to ensure the scalability, performance, and reliability of OpenAI's infrastructure. Build automation tools, maintain resilience patterns, and manage cloud resources to support a growing user base while partnering with cross-functional teams. ## Job description Join the engineering teams that bring OpenAI’s ideas safely to the world! The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. ## About the Role As OpenAI continues to grow, we are looking for experienced, problem-solving engineers to ensure our systems scale. Our success depends on our ability to quickly iterate on products while also ensuring that they are performant and reliable. You will work in a deeply iterative, collaborative, fast-paced environment to bring our technology to millions of users around the world, and ensure it’s delivered with safety and reliability in mind. Successful candidates will play a crucial role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems as we continue to expand. As a reliability expert, you will be at the forefront of maintaining and enhancing the stability, scalability, and performance of our rapidly evolving infrastructure. You will work closely with cross-functional teams, including software engineers, product managers, and data scientists, to build and maintain resilient systems that can handle our growing user base and workload. In this role, you will: - Design and implement solutions to ensure the scalability of our infrastructure to meet rapidly increasing demands. - Build and maintain the load, chaos and synthetic-testing software leveraged by development teams to make the systems they design and operate more reliable. - Build and maintain automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks and improve system reliability. - Build and maintain the platform for CPU, storage, GPU, and network lifecycle management to drive efficiency, accountability and dynamic optimization of our resources. - Implement fault-tolerant and resilient design patterns to minimize service disruptions. - Develop and maintain service level objectives (SLOs) and service level indicators (SLIs) to measure and ensure system reliability. - Partner with researchers, engineers, product managers, and designers to bring new features and research capabilities to the world. - Participate in an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents and ensure 24/7 system availability. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have a track record of accelerating engineering reliability by building world-class tooling and systems from 0→1. - Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed. - Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. - Enjoy seeking out and addressing bottlenecks and areas for performance improvement in our systems. - Utilize Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration management. - Are experienced in collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure that reliability and scalability are considered in the design and development of new features and services. Qualifications: - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field (or equivalent work experience). - Proven experience as an SWE focused on reliability or a similar role in a fast-paced, rapidly scaling company. - Strong proficiency in cloud infrastructure. - Proficiency in programming languages. - Experience with containerization technologies and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. - Knowledge of IaC tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation. - Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting skills. - Strong communication and collaboration skills. - Experience with observability tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana and Splunk. - Experience with microservices architecture and service mesh technologies. - Knowledge of security best practices in cloud environments. This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. ## 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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