# Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $255k – $405k/yr
**Skills:** Distributed Systems, System Design, Caching, Backpressure, Rate Limiting, Load Shedding, Observability, API Design, Progressive Delivery, Tail Latency Optimization
**Posted:** 2026-02-23

> Design and build infrastructure platforms for ChatGPT, focusing on scalability, reliability, and developer productivity. Requires experience with large-scale distributed systems, performance optimization, and creating reusable abstractions for engineering teams.

## Job Description

## 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.

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