Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure

Where You Can Have Impact

• Platform foundations & frameworks: core libraries, service frameworks, and shared components.
• Scalability & performance primitives: reduce tail latency, improve throughput, keep costs predictable.
• Reliability guardrails: rate limiting, load shedding, dependency isolation, backpressure, safe fallbacks.
• Developer productivity via golden paths: paved roads for common workflows.
• Observability & debugging systems: instrumentation, metrics, investigative tooling.
• Safe change management: deployment systems, progressive delivery, fast rollback.
• Interface and contract design: clean APIs and stable contracts.

What You’ll Do

• Build and evolve infrastructure platforms that many engineers and services depend on.
• Translate messy real-world constraints into clean abstractions: simple APIs, enforceable contracts, safe defaults.
• Drive improvements in reliability and performance through principled design, measurement, and iterative hardening.
• Partner across engineering and product to identify systemic pain points and turn them into reusable solutions.
• Own outcomes end-to-end: design → implementation → rollout → operational maturity.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production (high throughput, concurrency, and failure handling).
• Strong fundamentals in systems design, including caching, consistency, queueing/backpressure, and resilient dependency management.
• Ability to reason about performance (latency distributions, tail behavior, bottlenecks) and translate that into concrete engineering work.
• Track record of building platforms or shared infrastructure that improves velocity and correctness for other teams.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills—aligning on interfaces, navigating tradeoffs, and driving cross-team execution.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing paved roads / golden paths (frameworks, libraries, self-serve tooling) that shape engineering behavior at scale.
• Deep understanding of reliability techniques: graceful degradation, circuit breakers, load shedding, rate limiting, and fault isolation.
• Experience building systems for safe iteration: progressive delivery, correctness checks, automated rollout gates, and production validation.
• Strong instincts for API and contract design—how to create interfaces that are stable, evolvable, and hard to misuse.
• Prior work that demonstrates “force multiplier” impact: enabling many teams through a small number of well-chosen primitives.