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OpenAIOpenAISan Francisco, CA

Software Engineer, Frontier Clusters Infrastructure

Builds and scales massive Kubernetes clusters for OpenAI's frontier supercomputers, automates bare-metal provisioning, and ensures reliability across data centers for AI model training. Requires expertise in distributed systems, Kubernetes operations, and infrastructure automation.

230k – 490k/yr
On-siteDevOps / SRE

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Spin up and scale large Kubernetes clusters, including automation for provisioning, bootstrapping, and cluster lifecycle management
  • Build software abstractions that unify multiple clusters and present a seamless interface to training workloads
  • Own node bring-up from bare metal through firmware upgrades, ensuring fast, repeatable deployment at massive scale
  • Improve operational metrics such as reducing cluster restart times (e.g., from hours to minutes) and accelerating firmware or OS upgrade cycles
  • Integrate networking and hardware health systems to deliver end-to-end reliability across servers, switches, and data center infrastructure
  • Develop monitoring and observability systems to detect issues early and keep clusters stable under extreme load

Requirements

  • Deep experience operating or scaling Kubernetes clusters or similar container orchestration systems in high-growth or hyperscale environments
  • Strong programming or scripting skills (Python, Go, or similar) and familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation
  • Comfortable with bare-metal Linux environments, GPU hardware, and large-scale networking
  • Experience as an infrastructure, systems, or distributed systems engineer in large-scale or high-availability environments
  • Strong knowledge of Kubernetes internals, cluster scaling patterns, and containerized workloads
  • Proficiency in cloud infrastructure concepts (compute, networking, storage, security) and in automating cluster or data center operations

Nice-to-Haves

  • Background with GPU workloads, firmware management, or high-performance computing

Skills

KubernetesPythonGoTerraformLinuxGPUDistributed SystemsInfrastructure As CodeBare MetalNetworking

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